Font metrics are a little more complicated than that.
In typography, the point is the smallest unit of measure. It is used for measuring font size, leading, and other items on a printed page. The size of the point has varied throughout the history of printing. Since the 18th century, the point's size has varied from 0.18 to 0.4 millimeters. Following the advent of desktop publishing in the 1980s and 1990s, digital printing has largely supplanted the letterpress printing and has established the DTP point (DeskTop Publishing point) as the de facto sta...
Each glyph (i.e. “character”) may have a different width and height. They also have other properties, since some characters like lowercase “g” or uppercase “T” go beyond the width/height of typical glyphs.
In European and West Asian typography and penmanship, the baseline is the line upon which most letters "sit" and below which descenders extend.
In the example to the right, the letter 'p' has a descender; the other letters sit on the (red) baseline.
Most, though not all, typefaces are similar in the following ways as regards the baseline:
The vertical distance of the base lines of consecutive lines in a paragraph is also known as line height or leading, although the latter can also refer to ...
