Millimeter setting for font size not correct! cost me $1000s in reprinting
I'm a freelance designer working for a top hair care brand which markets their products world wide. We had our entire front label product run rejected because it did not meet EU regulatory standards for ml and net weight type size. When creating the labels the first time I set my font size from points to mm to ensure I met the minimum size requirements of 3mm. Imagine my surprise when we heard from our EU distributor our product was rejected! This is where I made my mistake I trusted Adobe Illustrator program to ensure when I set a font size at 3mm it was going to be 3mm. It WAS NOT it was around 2.5mm in size. How I confirm this after the news is I checked the ALL CAPS font against a 3mm square box. see attached screen shot from illustrator of the issue. This issue has cost my client and thousands in reprinting costs to correct the issue.
Adobe please fix this so we can trust point sizes are true. When I called in the customer service tech experienced the same issue here is my case #ADB-6064776-M9S5
Greg Auer
shared this idea
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Anonymous
commented
I work in packaging and am aware of regulatory pitfalls. My advice is to outline the font and measure whichever character the rules are based on (i.e. lower case letter, upper case letter). And then make it a little bit bigger. Better to be safe than sorry.
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Thomas Phinney commented
That’s not Adobe. That is you not understanding font size measurements. Which, admittedly, are extremely weird, and complicated.
When you tell pretty much ANY APP what size you want the font to be, what part of the font do you expect to be that size? The answer as to what the app does is: it makes the em square that size. That is the height of the imaginary box the letters sit in.
This makes more sense if you know the origins of the em (the size of the piece of metal the font glyphs were on), and/or consider that the sizing has to apply to radically different kinds of writing systems, such as Chinese and Arabic, where our notions of cap height or x-height do not even apply.
I wrote a blog post with more on this, here: https://www.thomasphinney.com/2011/03/point-size/
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ray allen
commented
My local print shop was helping me with a wine label a couple of years ago, and they told me to include a hairline 1mm grid as a background image on the proof sheet to make it easier to measure the actual type size on the proof sheet. The woman at the print shop said that many US and European government agencies now require type on alcoholic beverage labels to be a minimum size (depending on the size of the wine bottle) so this 1mm grid makes it easier to make sure that the type size on the alcoholic beverage label complies with government regulations.
If this 1mm hairline grid helps anyone else, please feel free to steal the idea.
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Caps height size doesn't equal font size.
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Greg Auer
commented
@egor I know the difference between x-height and font size if you read the copy was all caps so x-height does not apply
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I feel sorry for you, but this is not AI's fault, but how the fonts are described. Read about cap height, x-height and font size.
