Leading in the context of "White space (visual arts)"

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 printing's history. Since the 18th century, the size of a point has been between 0.18 and 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 desktop publishing (DTP) point as the de facto standard. The DTP point is defined as 1⁄72 of an inch (or exactly 0.3527 mm) and, as with earlier American point sizes, is considered to be 1⁄12 of a pica.

In metal type, the point size of a font describes the height of the metal body on which that font's characters were cast. In digital type, letters of a computer font are designed around an imaginary space called an em square. When a point size of a font is specified, the font is scaled so that its em square has a side length of that particular length in points. Although the letters of a font usually fit within the font's em square, there is not necessarily any size relationship between the two, so the point size does not necessarily correspond to any measurement of the size of the letters on the printed page.

Letter spacing, character spacing or tracking is an optically consistent typographical adjustment to the space between letters to change the visual density of a line or block of text. Letter spacing is distinct from kerning, which adjusts the spacing of particular pairs of adjacent characters such as "7." which would appear to be badly spaced if left unadjusted, and leading, the spacing between lines.

In typography, the body height or point size refers to the height of the space in which a glyph is defined.

Originally, in metal typesetting, the body height or the font (or point) size was defined by the height of the lead cuboid (metal sort) on which the actual font face is moulded. The body height of a metal sort defined the point size, and was usually slightly larger than the distance between the ascender and descender to allow additional space between the lines of text. More space might be achieved by inserting thin long pieces of lead between the lines of text (that is leading).