Small Math Problem Formula?

Question

Dude, I was never good with these, but uhh.. ok, I have this word document and I'm typing up a story at 9 pt font (yeah i know it's kinda small). My brothers typing up a story at 12 pt font. Er, I want to beat him with how many pages my story has. He has 36 pages at 12 pt font, I have 12 pages at 9 pt font. I want to know the increase. So for example:

When my stories at 3 pages on 9 pt font, it turns out to be 6 pages on 12 pt font

Pages 9 ptf font || Pages 12 pt font
3 || 6
4 || 7
7 || 13
9 || 16
12 || 20
? || 40


Is their a formula I can use to calcuate how much it'll increase? I want to know what 9 pt font page number I have to hit before I know I beat him. (FYI yeah I know it's content not length that counts. But trust me it's lengthy and content..er..full)

Answer 1

Points are a unit of letter height in printing. There are 72 points to an inch, so by using a 72-pt. font, your printing will be 1" tall. As far as how many pages you'll have, that will depend on the size of your margins.

I think they chose 72 because it's divisible by so many numbers:
9-pt. font = 8 lines of printing per inch.
10-pt. font = 7.2 lines per inch, or 36 lines per five inches.
12-pt. font = 6 lines per inch. Each line is 1/6 of an inch tall.
18-pt. font = 4 lines per inch. Each line is 1/4 of an inch tall.
24-pt. font = 3 lines per inch. Each line is 1/3 of an inch tall.
36-pt. font = 2 lines per inch. Each line is 1/2 of an inch tall.
72-pt. font = 1 inch for each line.
108-pt. font = 1.5 inches for each line.
144-pt. font = 2 inches for each line.

Answer 2

Instead, change the word spacing. Change the paragraph settings (select all your text, right click, select paragraph) and change the line spacing to 14 or 15 pt. It will look almost double spaced, but it will make your story take up more pages.

Answer 3

Unfortunately, due to the way that Word (and most others) align characters, there really isn't any good formula.

One thing you might try is to 'center justify' your text instead of left justifying it (as most people do) That'll put more 'white space' between the words and possible wrap a few lines.


Doug