Information
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In typography, a font (also fount) is traditionally defined as a quantity of sorts composing a complete character set of a single size and style of a particular typeface. For example, the set of all characters for 9-point Bulmer italic is a font, and the 10-point size would be a separate font, as would the 9-point upright. Bulmer regular, Bulmer italic, Bulmer bold and Bulmer bold italic are four fonts, but one typeface. However, the term font is also often used as a metonym for typeface.
Etymology The term font, a doublet of the word fondue, derives from Middle French fonte, meaning "(something that has been) melt(ed)", referring to type produced by casting molten metal at a type foundry. Metal type In a traditional manual printing (letterpress) house the font would refer to a complete set of metal type that would be used to typeset an entire page. A font when bought new would often be sold as (for example in a roman alphabet) 12pt 14A 34a, meaning that it would be a size 12-point font containing 14 uppercase 'A's, and 34 lowercase 'A's. Some metal type required in typesetting, such as dashes, spaces and line-height spacers, were not part of a specific font, but were generic pieces which could be used with any font. Font characteristics
In addition to the character height, when using the mechanical sense of the term, there are several characteristics which may distinguish fonts, though they would also depend on the script(s) that the typeface supports. The regular or standard font is often labeled roman, both to distinguish it from bold or thin and from italic or oblique. Different fonts of the same face may be used in the same work for various degrees and types of emphasis. Weight The weight of a particular font is the thickness of the character outlines relative to their height. If no bold weight is provided, many renderers (browsers, word processors, graphic and DTP programs) support faking a bolder font by rendering the outline a second time at an offset, or just smearing it slightly at a diagonal angle. that means one normal font may appear bolder than some other normal font. For example, fonts intended to be used in posters are often quite bold by default while fonts for long runs of text are rather light. Therefore weight designations in font names may differ in regard to the actual absolute stroke weight or density of glyphs in the font. There are many names used to describe the weight of a font in its name, differing among type foundries and designers, but their relative order is usually fixed, something like this:
The terms normal, regular and plain, sometimes also book, are being used for the standard weight font of a typeface. Slope In todays European typefaces, especially roman ones, the font style is usually connected to the angle. When the normal, roman or upright font is slanted usually to the right in left-to-right scripts the lowercase character shapes change slightly as well, approaching a more handwritten, cursive style. Although rarely encountered, a typographic face may be accompanied by a matching calligraphic face, which might be considered a further font style of one typeface. In Frutigers nomenclature the second digit for upright fonts is a 5, for italic fonts a 6. There are other aspects that can differ among font styles, but more often these are considered immanent features of the typeface. Width Some typefaces include fonts that vary the width of the characters (stretch). Optical size Some professional digital typefaces include fonts that are optimised for certain sizes. One such scheme, invented and popularized by Adobe Systems, refers to the variant fonts by the applications those are typically used for, with the exact point sizes intended varying slightly by typeface:
Metrics Font metrics refers to metadata consisting of numeric values relating to size and space in the font overall, or in its individual glyphs. Serifs
Although most typefaces are characterised by their use of serifs, there are superfamilies that incorporate serif (antiqua) and sans-serif (grotesque) or even intermediate slab serif (Egyptian) or semi-serif fonts with the same base outlines. A more common font variant, especially of serif typefaces, is that of alternate capitals. (April 2010)
Ligature Letter-spacing Kerning Majuscule Minuscule Small caps CamelCase Initial x-height Overshoot Baseline Median Cap height Ascender Descender Diacritics Counter Text figures Subscript and superscript Dingbat Glyph
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