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Typeface

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"Font" redirects here. For other uses, see Font (disambiguation).
File:Caslonsample.jpg
A Specimen of typeset fonts and languages, by William Caslon, letter founder; from the 1728 Cyclopaedia.

In typography, a typeface consists of a co-ordinated set of grapheme (i.e., character) designs. A typeface usually comprises an alphabet of letters, numerals, and punctuation marks. A typeface may also include or consist of ideograms and symbols (e.g., mathematical or map-making glyphs).

In metal type, the word font denoted a complete typeface in a particular size (usually measured in points), one weight (e.g., light, book, bold, black), and one orientation or angle (e.g. roman, italic, oblique). As regards digital type, the font is the computer file that stores the vector paths, before they are brought into being on a screen or a page. Digital fonts do contain unlimited (or application-limited) sizes. Some applications can create additional weights or orientations of a font automatically, but these are not considered typographically correct as human intervention is required to make these adjustments well.

A font family is a group of related fonts which vary only in weight, orientation, width, etc. For examples, Times is a font family, whereas Times Roman, Times Italic and Times Bold are each fonts. Most font families contain a handful of fonts, though some (e.g. Zapf Dingbats) may contain only one, and others (e.g. Helvetica) may contain dozens of fonts.

The art of designing typefaces, called type design, is the occupation of a type designer. Helvetica, Century Schoolbook, and Courier are three popular examples of typefaces.

History

A font, from Middle French fonte, meaning "(something that has been) melt(ed) [akin to Fondue]" and referring to letters of a typeface produced by casting molten metal at a type foundry, consists of a set of glyphs (images) representing the characters from a particular character set in a particular typeface. Historically, fonts came in specific sizes (governing the actual height of the characters), and in sorts (governing the quantities of each letter provided). The design of a given character in a font took into account all these factors. In addition, as the spectrum of available designs and requirements of publishers has broadened over the centuries, fonts of specific weight (how dark the text appears—bold or light, for example) and additional specific conditions (most commonly "regular" as opposed to " italic" and/or "condensed") have led to "typeface families", collections of closely-related typeface designs that may include hundreds of styles.

English-speaking printers have used the term fount for centuries to refer to the multipart device used (in its day) to assemble and print in a particular size and typeface design. Type foundries cast virtually all fonts in various lead alloys from the 1450s until the middle of the 20th century, though wood served to make a few large fonts (wood type), especially in the United States of America. In the 1890s mechanized typesetting emerged and began casting fonts on-the-fly in the form of lines of type of the size and length needed. This became known as "hot metal" type, and it remained profitable and widespread until its demise in the 1970s. The first machine of this type was the Linotype invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler.

During a relatively brief transitional period (circa 1950s – 1990s), photographic technology, known as "phototypesetting", produced fonts which came on rolls or discs of film. Photographic typesetting allowed for optical scaling, which meant that designers could produce multiple sizes from a single font (although physical constraints on the reproduction system used still required design-changes at different sizes — for example, ink traps and spikes to allow for spread of ink). Manually-operated phototypographic composition systems (using fonts made on rolls of film) allowed fine kerning between letters without great physical effort for the first time and spawned a large type-design industry in the 1960s and 1970s.

The mid-1970s saw all of the major typeface technologies and all their fonts in use: from the original letterpress process of Gutenberg to mechanical metal typesetters, phototypositors, computer-controlled phototypesetters, and the earliest digital typesetters, (hulking machines with tiny processors and CRT outputs). From the mid-1980s, as digital typography has relentlessly grown, users have almost universally adopted the American spelling font, which nowadays nearly always means a computer file containing scalable, outline letterforms ("digital fonts"), usually in one of several common formats. Designers of some fonts, such as Microsoft's Verdana, intend their product primarily for use on computer screens.

Digital fonts may encode the image of each character either as a bitmap, in a bitmap font (seldom used since 1995) or by a higher-level description in terms of lines and curves enclosing a space (an outline font, also called a "vector font"). An outline "rasterizer" then fills the enclosed space of an outline font, deciding which pixels to represent as "black" and which as "white". The rasterization proceeds in straightforward fashion at higher resolutions (as for example in laser printers and in high-end publishing systems) but for screens, where each individual pixel can mean the difference between legibility and illegibility, digital fonts need hints included to make readable bitmaps at small sizes. Digital fonts today also contain data representing the "typography" used to compose them, including kerning pairs, component-creation data for accented characters, glyph-substitution rules for Arabic typography and for connecting script faces, and for simple everyday ligatures like "fl". (Common description languages that format digital type include METAFONT, PostScript, TrueType and OpenType. Enablers of these formats, including the rasterizers, appear in Microsoft and Apple Computer operating systems, Adobe Systems products and those of several other companies.)

Typeface anatomy

Typographers have derived a comprehensive vocabulary for describing and discussing the appearances of typefaces. Some vocabulary applies only to a subset of all scripts.

Serifs

Sans-serif font
Serif font
Serif font (serifs
highlighted in red)

One can sub-divide fonts into two main categories: those of serif and sans-serif fonts. Serifs comprise the small features at the end of strokes within letters. The printing industry refers to typeface without serifs as sans-serif (from French sans: "without"), or as grotesque (or, in German, grotesk).

Great variety exists among both serif and sans-serif fonts; both groups contain faces designed for setting large amounts of body text, and others intended primarily as decorative. The presence or absence of serifs forms only one of many factors to consider when choosing a font.

Typefaces with serifs are often considered easier to read in long passages than those without. Studies on the matter are ambiguous, suggesting that most of this effect is due to the greater familiarity of serif typefaces. As a general rule, printed works such as newspapers and books almost always use serif fonts, at least for the text body. Web sites do not have to specify a font and can simply respect the browser settings of the user. But of those websites that do specify a font, most use modern sans-serif fonts such as Verdana, because it is commonly believed that, in contrast to the case for printed material, sans-serif fonts are easier than serif fonts to read on computer screens due to their lower resolution.

Proportionality

A proportional font displays glyphs using varying widths, while a non-proportional or fixed-width or monospace font uses fixed glyph-widths.

Most people generally find proportional fonts nicer-looking and easier to read; and thus they appear more commonly in professionally published printed material. For the same reason, GUI computer applications (such as word processors and web browsers) typically use proportional fonts. However, many proportional fonts contain fixed-width figures so that columns of numbers stay aligned.

However, non-proportional fonts function better than proportional fonts for some purposes because their characters line up in nice, neat columns. Most non-electronic typewriters and text-only computer displays use only non-proportional fonts. Most computer programs which have a text-based interface (terminal emulators, for example) use only non-proportional fonts in their configuration. Most computer programmers prefer to use monospace fonts while editing source code.

ASCII art requires a non-proportional font for proper viewing. In a web page, the <pre> </pre> HTML tag most commonly specifies non-proportional fonts. In LaTeX, the verbatim environment uses non-proportional fonts.

Any two lines of typical text with the same number of characters in each line in non-proportional font should display as equal in width, while the same two lines in proportional font may have radically different widths. This comes about because wide characters' glyphs (WQZMDOHU) use more linear space and narrow characters' glyphs (itl[]1|I) use less linear space than the average-width glyph when using a proportional font.

Editors read manuscripts in fixed-width fonts for ease of editing. The publishing industry considers it discourteous to submit a manuscript in a proportional font.

Measurements

The characters "Aghfy", set in Palatino to illustrate the concepts of baseline, x-height, body size, descent and ascent.
The characters "Aghfy", set in Palatino to illustrate the concepts of baseline, x-height, body size, descent and ascent.

Most, if not all, scripts share the notion of a baseline: an imaginary horizontal line on which characters rest. In some scripts, parts of glyphs lie below the baseline. The descent spans the distance between the baseline and the lowest descending glyph in a typeface, and the part of a glyph that descends below the baseline has the name "descender". Conversely, the ascent spans the distance between the baseline and the top of the glyph that reaches farthest from the baseline. The ascent and descent may or may not include distance added by accents or diacritical marks.

In the Latin, Greek and Cyrillic scripts, one can refer to the distance from the baseline to the top of regular lowercase glyphs as the x-height, and the part of a glyph rising above the x-height as the "ascender". The height of the ascender can have a dramatic effect on the readability and appearance of a font. The ratio between the x-height and the ascent often serves to characterise typefaces.

Types of fonts

Since a plethora of typefaces has been created over the centuries, they are commonly categorized according to their appearance. At the highest level, one can differentiate between serif, sans-serif, script, blackletter, display, monospace, and symbol fonts. Historically, the first fonts were blackletter, followed by serif, then sans-serif and then the other types of font.

Serif fonts

Main article: Serif

Serif, or "roman", typefaces are named for the features at the ends of their strokes. Times Roman and Garamond are common examples of serif typefaces. Serif fonts are probably the most used classification in printed materials, including most books, newspapers and magazines.

Sans-serif fonts

Main article: Sans-serif

The typographical phenomenon of sans-serif designs appeared relatively recently in the history of type design. The two-line English so-called "Egyptian" font, released in 1816 by William Caslon's foundry in England apparently furnished the first specimen. They serve commonly, but not exclusively, for display typography applications such as signage, headings, and other situations demanding clear meaning but without the need for continuous reading. The text on web pages offers an exception: it appears mostly in sans-serif font because serifs make small letters less readable on a computer monitor.

Script fonts

Script fonts simulate handwriting or calligraphy. They do not lend themselves to quantities of body text, as people find them harder to read than many serif and sans-serif fonts; they are typically used for logos or invitations. Examples include Coronet and Zapfino.

Blackletter fonts

Main article: Blackletter

Blackletter fonts, the earliest fonts used with the invention of the printing press, resemble the blackletter calligraphy of that time. Many people refer to them as gothic script. Various forms exist including textualis, rotunda, schwabacher, and fraktur.

Display fonts

Display fonts are used exclusively for decorative purposes, and are not suitable for body text. They have the most distinctive designs of all fonts, and may even incorporate pictures of objects, animals, etc. into the character designs. They usually have very specific characteristics (e.g. evoking the Wild West, Christmas, horror films, etc.) and hence very limited uses.

Monospace fonts

Monospace fonts are typefaces in which every character is the same width (usually, font width is variable; the "w" and "m" are wider than most letters, and the "i" is narrower). The first monospaced typefaces were designed for typewriters, which could only move the same distance forward with each letter typed. Their use continued with early computers, which could only display a single font. Although modern computers can display any desired typeface, monospaced fonts are still important for computer programming, terminal emulation, and for laying out tabulated data in plain text documents. Examples of monospace typefaces are Courier, Prestige Elite, and Monaco.

Symbol fonts

Main article: Dingbat

Symbol, or Dingbat, fonts consist of symbols (such as decorative bullets, clock faces, railroad timetable symbols, CD-index, or TV-channel enclosed numbers) rather than normal text characters. Examples include Zapf Dingbats, Sonata, and Wingdings.

Texts used to demonstrate typefaces

A sentence that uses all of the alphabet (a pangram), such as "the quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog", is often used as a design aesthetic tool to demonstrate the personality of a typefaces characters in a setting. For extended settings of typefaces graphic designers often use nonsense text (commonly referred to as "greeking"), such as lorem ipsum or Latin text such as the beginning of Cicero's in Catilinam. Greeking is used in typography to determine a typefaces "color", or weight and style, and to demonstrate an overall typographic aesthetic prior to actual type setting.

United States law does not permit the copyrighting of typeface designs, while allowing the patenting of unusually novel designs. Digital fonts that embody a particular design often become copyrightable as computer programs. The names of the typefaces can become trademarked. As a result of these various means of legal protection, sometimes the same typeface exists in multiple names and implementations.

Some elements of the software engines used to display typefaces on computers have software patents associated with them. In particular, Apple Computer has patented some of the hinting algorithms for TrueType, requiring open-source alternatives such as FreeType to use different algorithms.

See also

Organizations

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