> Hi everybody,
>
> strange request but is there a proper name for the bottom half and the top
> half of a letter?
>
> and no i'm not talking about serifs
>
> love and letters
> cris
Oddly enough, I was reading about this just the other day, chris.
If we begin with Roman majuscules [capital letters?], every letter is the
same height. With the Uncial and Half Uncial literary hands, "certain
Uncial letters began to show strokes extending above and below the height of
Roman capitals. The Half Uncial showed an even more obvious movement toward
minuscule [lower case?] letters, with fairly pronounced ascenders [sic] and
descenders [sic]."
So the answer to your question would seem to be that letters come in three
parts, and the bits sticking above the middle are ascenders [the upper bit
of "d", for instance], while the bits sticking down [the bottom bit of "g"]
are descenders.
(From Frederick Wong, /The Complete Calligrapher/.)
Cheers,
Robin
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