Why is there extra whitespace at the bottom of the text bounding box?

[RGSD Consulting]

Hey all,

Curious to know why does Illustrator add a semingly random amount of whitespace to the bottom of a text box? This is really frustrating when you want to properly space out/mesaure items against one another.

In the example attached my font in 72pts and i've manually moved the  bounding box to the bottom of the text's baseline, but there still persists this annoying whitespace shown when you highlight it (black box). I could understand if it was leading but my leading is set to the same size, 72pts as the line of text.

Any ideas how I can change this?

[Ton Frederiks · Accepted solution]

You could apply the Effect > Path > Outline Object and turn on Use Preview Bounds (in the Preferences or from the Align Panel)

[Mylenium · Accepted solution]

It's not random or arbitrary at all. Every glyph in a font has an em box and by definition this includes all extensions to the top and bottom for letters lik g and d or caps, including diacrits. Since it's used for calculating lien spacing and all that, it's natural that a font selection will show it all.

Mylenium