The staff is made of four main
components: beardline, baseline,
meanline and capline.

Typographic characters have an inherent gravity. They are

most comfortable standing upright on firm ground. This is

the way they evolved. The lineup takes place on the STAPF,

which is an imaginary system of guidelines used to align

letters evenly in sequence.

I

1

ІШ 111 III

The x-height is the distance between
the baseline and meanline of the
lowercase character, minus the ascender
and descender. The x-height varies in
proportion with the ascender height and
descender depth in different typefaces.