Comments on: Leading, Leeding, or Lehding?

Question: Leading, Leeding, or Lehding?

brownpau — Fri, 04 Jun 2004 07:42:41 -0800

How does one pronounce "leading," the term in printing for space between lines of type? "Leeee," or "Leh?"

By: btwillig

btwillig — Fri, 04 Jun 2004 07:43:08 -0800

leh

By: skylar

skylar — Fri, 04 Jun 2004 07:45:23 -0800

ledding

By: skylar

skylar — Fri, 04 Jun 2004 07:46:18 -0800

Forgot to say... it's something to do with the bits of lead that printing press people put between the lines to space them out.

By: i_cola

i_cola — Fri, 04 Jun 2004 07:48:34 -0800

it's something to do with the bits of lead that printing press people put between the lines to space them out

Not so much 'something to do with' as 'actually is' ;-)

By: milovoo

milovoo — Fri, 04 Jun 2004 08:00:42 -0800

Just FYI, the on-line American Heritage® has free pronunciation.

By: brownpau

brownpau — Fri, 04 Jun 2004 08:09:29 -0800

Thanks, folks. And thanks, milovoo; I'll be using that a lot more than Dictionary.com from now on.

By: mathowie

mathowie — Fri, 04 Jun 2004 08:32:52 -0800

A lot of the terms we still use today in typesetting come from those old days of hot-metal; for example, leading, (pronounced "ledding" - the spacing between lines of type) is called that because the spacing was created by putting strips of lead between the rows of characters.

(from this short history of type)

By: luriete

luriete — Fri, 04 Jun 2004 10:00:45 -0800

And you can come and see me set actual leading in my garage if you're ever in Sacramento. How exciting!

By: normy

normy — Fri, 04 Jun 2004 10:55:48 -0800

Is there any practical difference in meaning between 'leading' and 'line-height' (as used in CSS)?

By: bonaldi

bonaldi — Fri, 04 Jun 2004 10:57:11 -0800

I don't know about CSS specifically, but leading is the space between the lines, and those lines can be any height. I can have lines 9pt high, but with 20pt leading there's another 11pts of space between the lines. Does that make sense?

By: normy

normy — Fri, 04 Jun 2004 11:10:05 -0800

Yes, I think so. In that case I'm assuming that if line-height were 150%, for example, then the leading would be 50%. In print production I suspect they don't use % relative units, however, but hopefully you see what I mean.