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In other words, he decides the line height (his rhythm) first, then fits his text into it. I was not clear on that point either.

The problem I have, then, is that he never really explains why that's a good approach, or from where one would pick a line height to key off from. How will thinking in terms of rhythms be an improvement over fiddling with font sizes and line heights until it looks "right"?

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"In my experience a line height of 1.5 x the base font size is a great place to start, and is usually right on target."

You start with your base font size, you choose an appropriate line-height for that (based largely on designerly notions like visual weight, column width, contrast, intuition, etc.) then that lineheight (in pixels) becomes your rhythm.

The idea is that elements like headings, short quotes, possibly images are less sensitive to line-height than body copy, so it's okay to fudge them a little bit to keep the overall rhythm intact.

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