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characters per inch (cpi)

The Characters per Inch (cpi) specification is generally interpreted as a typographical specification: How many characters can be displayed on a width of one inch? This information depends directly on the size and type of font. Fewer characters can be represented on one inch by larger fonts than by small font sizes.

By changing the font size, you can fit more or fewer digits, letters, and characters on a given unit of length. Inword processing, character per line( cpl) is used rather than character per inch (cpi).

Characters per inch (cpi), however, is used for bar codes and 2D codes and is a measure of bar code density. Depending on the bar code and thus the number of bars and gaps with which an information character is represented, a character can consist of five bars and gaps, as in Code 2/5. With a minimum width of 0.2 mm, this results in a width of 1 mm per character and thus 25 characters per inch (cpi).

The term Characters per Inch (cpi) was also used in the past in magnetic tape technology. This gives information about how much space a character took up on a magnetic tape. From 200 µm per character, it can be calculated that 125 characters per inch could be stored.

Informations:
Englisch: characters per inch - cpi
Updated at: 06.05.2011
#Words: 206
Links: inch, information, font, unit (U), line
Translations: DE
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