Drew Ink The year

Hairline

The thinnest stroke in a face, and the first thing to disappear when the size drops or the paper is rough.

Hairline: a letter in the house face with the hairline marked in vermilion.
Hairline, drawn, Drew Ink. Drawn 2026-09-29.
Hairline: EFGH from Bodoni's Manuale tipografico, the serifs and the thin strokes drawn as hairlines against heavy stems.
Bodoni's hairlines, the Manuale, 1818, Giambattista Bodoni, punchcutter.
Public domainPublic domain: Printed in Parma in 1818 from Bodoni's types by his widow; out of copyright everywhere; Commons tags the file public domain, and this house reads a faithful photograph of a flat public-domain page as carrying no new copyright.
Cropped to four capitals. Retrieved 2026-09-10.

Near it

Stroke contrastDidoneOptical size

What it is made of

measured on this shelfthe o's stem as a fraction of its own width: Drew Hairline at 0.1338, the thinnest solid o on the shelf, against 0.1639 for the next (Drew Extended), 0.2173 for Drew Grotesk and 0.3727 for Drew Extrude, the thickest. Drew Engrave and Drew Outline read 0.042 because the line the tool finds is their outline, not a stemmeasured on the fixed shelf, 2026-09-24, which renders the o at 600px and counts pixels, because a counter is an AREA and a contrast is a RATIO and neither is in any table. The 0.1088 to 0.3180 this row carried were measured on a build replaced before it shipped
and it is thin all the way roundDrew Hairline measures 1.024 on its o, which is monolinear, and its e-bar is 0.860 of its stem like most of the shelfa hairline face here is a thin face whose crossbars are lightened the same fraction as everyone else's, not the light half of a contrast pair. Corrected 2026-09-11: this row said there is no contrast on this shelf at all, which the o supports and the stroke data does not. The 1.024 re-measured on the fixed shelf, 2026-09-24