|
In typography, a typeface consists of a co-ordinated set of grapheme (i.e., character) designs. A typeface is usually comprised of an alphabet of letters, numerals, and punctuation marks. Helvetica, Century Schoolbook, and Courier are three examples of typefaces. A typeface may also include or consist of ideograms and symbols (e.g., mathematical or map making glyphs). The art of designing typefaces, called type design, is the occupation of a type designer.
In metal type, the word font denoted a complete typeface in a particular size (usually measured in points), weight (e.g., light, book, bold, black), and orientation (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. As James Felici says in The Complete Manual of Typography, the font is the cookie cutter, and the typeface is the cookie.
Introduction
A font, from Middle French fonte, meaning "(something that has been) melt(ed)" 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 founts in various lead alloys from the 1450s until the middle of the 20th century, though wood served to make a few large founts (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.
During a relatively brief transitional period (circa 1950s – 1990s), photographic technology, known as "phototypesetting", produced founts 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) 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 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 characterisation
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). See serif for etymological notes.
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 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
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.
Font families
Since a plethora of typefaces has been created over the centuries, they are commonly categorized into families according to their appearance. Interestingly, this categorization corresponds vaguely with the historic evolution of typefaces.
At the highest level, one can differentiate between blackletter, serif, sans-serif, and decorational fonts.
Note: The following font samples print a sentence of patent nonsense, whose only purpose is to contain all letters of the alphabet (pangram).
Blackletter fonts
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.
Textualis lettering
- Of all the blackletter typefaces, the Textualis ones (or Old English) most closely resemble the Textura calligraphy used with manual copying of books. Johannes Gutenberg carved a textualis typeface - including a large number of ligatures and common abbreviations - when he printed his 42-line Bible,
|
Schwabacher lettering
- Schwabacher typefaces dominated in Germany from about 1480 to 1530, and the style continued in use occasionally until the 20th century. Most importantly, all of the works of Martin Luther, leading to the Protestant Reformation, as well as the Apocalypse of Albrecht Dürer (1498) used this typeface. Johannes Bämler, a printer from Augsburg, probably first used it as early as 1472. The origins of the name remain unclear; some assume that a typeface-carver from the village of Schwabach - one who worked externally and who thus became known as the Schwabacher - designed the typeface.
|
Fraktur lettering
- The Fraktur family became the most commonly known among the blackletter typefaces. It started when Emperor Maximilian I (1493 - 1519) established a series of books and had a new typeface created specifically for this purpose. Printers in Germany made extensive use of Fraktur faces until the Nazis prohibited them in 1942.
|
Serif fonts
Serif fonts, sometimes called roman, in their turn cover four major groups:
The Garamond typeface
- Renaissance or Garalde Oldstyle, with only slight differences in thickness within each glyph; this category includes the Garamond and Palatino typefaces.
The Times New Roman typeface
- Baroque or Transitional, where the thickness within each glyph has greater variety; this category includes Baskerville and Times Roman.
The Bodoni typeface
- Classicist, Didone, or Modern, with the most variance of thickness within each glyph. The introduction of finer typecasting techniques in the mid-1700s allowed and strongly influenced the design of these fonts. This family includes the Bodoni and Century Schoolbook typefaces.
The Rockwell typeface
- Contemporary fonts, especially those designed primarily for decorative purposes, frequently fall outside any of these categories. For example, slab serif fonts such as Rockwell look artificial on purpose, with almost rectangular shapes.
Sans-serif fonts
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.
For the purposes of type classification sans-serif designs broadly divide into four major groups:
The Arial typeface
The Frutiger typeface
The Futura typeface
- Geometric (Futura or Spartan).
Other commonly-used sans-serif fonts include Optima, Tahoma and Verdana.
Note that in some sans-serif fonts I (capital-i) and l (lowercase-L) appear exactly identical. (Arial: Il) Verdana, however, keeps them distinct: Il due to the fact that Verdana's capital-i, as an exception, has serifs.
Script fonts
Script fonts simulate handwriting: Zapfino and Zapf Chancery provide examples. They do not lend themselves very well to quantities of body text, as people find them harder to read than many serif and sans-serif fonts.
Novelty fonts
Novelty fonts have very unusual character shapes, 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. They are not suitable for body text.
PI fonts
PI fonts mostly consist of pictograms, such as decorative bullets, clock faces, railroad timetable symbols, CD-index or TV-channel enclosed numbers. Examples include Zapf dingbats, Webdings and Wingdings.
Symbol fonts
Symbol fonts consist of symbols rather than normal text characters. Examples include Zapf Dingbats (a popular font containing numerous miscellaneous symbols) and Sonata (a music font).
Monochrome or with shades of grey
Digital bitmap fonts (and the final rendering of vector fonts) may use monochrome or shades of gray. The latter serves for the purposes of anti-aliasing; it does not mix well with images with a transparent background, except when designers apply partial transparency. Note that no theoretical difference exists between a low-resolution grayscale bitmap and a high-resolution monochrome bitmap resampled at the same low resolution.
Texts used to demonstrate typefaces
A pangram such as "the quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog" often serves to demonstrate the appearance of a typeface. In extended settings of typefaces, nonsense text such as lorem ipsum or Latin text such as the beginning of Cicero's in Catilinam commonly appears.
Legal aspects of typefaces
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.
Related articles
Organizations
External links
- Examples of Old English Fonts Good example of Old English Fonts
- 20 Best License-Free Quality Fonts compiled by Vitaly Friedman.
- DaFont Probably the richest and best-known font archive on the Internet. In French or English.
- Free Downloadable Fonts, 100's of free fronts and graphic design articles.
- Identifont, Font identifier.
- Font File Types
- Fontforge font design free software (GPL).
- Free Foreign Language Fonts 100s of free, downloadable typefaces for over 40 languages
- Free Font Downloads, Free Fonts and Clipart Downloads.
- CSS Font properties?, Font style, weight, size and family.
- SearchFreeFonts.com, nice archive of free fonts in different categories.
- NeedFonts.com, a free font resource for PCs and Macs
- Typeface Terminology, a glossary by William Adams
- One Typeface, Many Fonts, by William Adams
- Guide to making fonts
- Typo.cz, information on Central-European typography and typesetting
- Diacritics Project, materials for designing a font with accents
- Directory of free fonts website
|
