Typographic units are the units of measurement used in
typography or
typesetting. The traditional units are different from common
metric units, as they were established earlier. Even though these units are all very small, across a line of print they add up quickly. Confusions such as resetting text originally in type of one unit in type of another will result in words moving from one line to the next, resulting in all sorts of typesetting errors (viz.
rivers of white,
widows and orphans, disrupted tables, and misplaced captions).