Hi Charles,

Thanks for your responses. I was looking around and found a page on typography that said much the same thing you did. Okay, so a inch = 72 pts.

Context: I am the Reference and Instructional Services at my seminary. It's my job to help students follow our local standards for formatting papers, built mostly on Turabian 8th ed. There are special rules for title pages. The first line, directly below the 1" margin, has the school's name. Exactly 48 points below that is the title of the paper. 72 pts. below the title is the type of paper being submitted. Etc. I did not create this standard, which goes well past Turabian 8.

Times New Roman 12 pts. is the seminary's requirement. I wasn't at that meeting or the meetings of publishers that require this same font and size. Otherwise, I would have vociferously objected. I personally loathe, hate, and despise Times New Roman. I find serif fonts much harder to read than sans serif fonts. I tend to work in Arial and if I need to submit my work someplace, I do a global change to TNR.

What I am trying to accomplish to show a model title page that has a "ruler" down the size, which highlights the places to put things. So if the first line below the bottom of the margin is 12 pts. high, the title needs to start at 60 pts. below the margin. So I want to highlight 60 pts., since the school name is fixed and 48 pts is 48 pts. 12+48 = 60. I am having a difficult time, however, lining these up exactly.

In theory, the "60" and all the pt values above and below it should be in Times New Roman 12. If I make those numbers 12 pts., however, they don't line up correctly with the text. I set the paragraph for the school name to be followed by 48 pts. but when I go down to 60 pts., this does not line up with the first line of the title at all.

I have attached this sample title page so you an see what I mean. My first page only treated the name of the school as 6 pts. but in a 12 pt. font, the bottom of the school name should line up using a physical ruler with the bottom of 12 in my custom ruler. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. I changed the sizes of the point numbers to try to make them line up, which should be unnecessary, but it seemed like it was necessary. Thanks for any suggestions on how to fix this so that I can show our masters-level students what to do. Thanks.

Should a single box in the grid be six points high? I'm in Word 2016 at work if that matters. Thanks.

doctorduncan