Metrics for real-estate on the page

["G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@CraneSoftwrights.com>]

I'm curious, Jean, how the metrics work in a UBL layout for the height and 
length of a field of characters filled in by a user.

For example, I can picture the "Seller" field to be, say, five lines deep 
and half of the page wide.  But how best would we express the width in a 
formatting specification?  By a percentage of the width of the table?  By a 
number of characters?

For each "cell" or box in a laid-out form I would like to document to the 
reader:

(1) how many groups are expected in the box (which is typically one but 
could be quite a few for the line items box of a continuation page),

(2) how many lines of text fit in the box

(3) how much text to put on the line (either by number of characters, 
absolute width, percentage width, whatever you suggest)

What would you recommend, and do you think I have missed any metric we 
would need to document?

What would others recommend we use for metrics for the contents of boxes?

............... Ken

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