Typography Glossary - {@font-face} Toolkit | CSS: Presentation Layer

Typography Glossary

afm (Adobe Font Metrics)

A specification for storing font metrics (character widths, kerning pairs, etc.) in a text file.

Advance Width

The distance between the start of this character and the start of the next character. Sometimes called the character's width.

Ascender

A stem on a lower case letter which extends above the x-height. "l" has an ascender. See also X-height, Cap-height, Descender, Overshoot, Baseline

Anchor Class

Used to specify mark-to-base and cursive gpos subtables. See overview.

Ascent

In traditional typography the ascent of a font was the distance from the top of a block of type to the baseline.

Its precise meaning in modern typograph seems to vary with different definers.

atsui (Apple Type Services for Unicode Imaging)

Apple's advanced typographical system, a set of services for rendering Unicode-encoded text starting with Mac OS 8.5 and in OS X.

atsui replaced the WorldScript engine for legacy encodings and was then itself replaced by the Core Text Unicode imaging engine in OS X 10.5 (Leopard).

Alphabet

A limited collection of symbols used to represent in writing the sounds of a particular language or group of languages.

aat Fonts

The Apple Advanced Typography digital font format; an extension of TrueType and PostScript font formats, formally known as GX fonts

afdko (Adobe Font Development Kit for OpenType)

afdko reference on Adobe Developer Connection.

gdk (Glyphlet Development Kit)

Adobe dgk for SING Gaiji Architecture reference..

AdobeStandardEncoding

A specific mapping of certain glyphs to certain cells, in this respect it resembles FontSpecific encoding. The importance difference between it and various FontSpecific mappings is that operating environments are expected to remap AdobeStandardEncoding fonts according to their own requirement. So, although it does assign glyphs to cells, no operating environment actually uses these assignments and any environment remaps the glyphs before rendering them.

Abjad

A form of writing in which the vowels are omitted or optional, such as Hebrew and Arabic scripts.

Abugida

A form of writing in which the consonants and vowels in a syllable are treated as a cluster or unit; typical of scripts from South Asia.

aesc

The aesc (pronounced "ash") is a ligature of the letters a and e. Archaic in English it is representative of a dipthong vowel sound in certain languages.

All Caps

Text set completely in uppercase or all capital letters.

Also known as all uppercase, and all capitals.

Arm

The horizontal stroke on some characters that doesn't connect to a stroke or stem at one or both ends. The top of the capital "T" and the horizontal strokes of "F" and "E" are examples of arms. Additionally, the diagonal upward stroke on a "K" is its arm.

Arms can be used interchangeably with bar, or crossbar, or cross stroke.

Arm is often also used to describe the horizontal top stroke of "C", double-storey a, "G", and other glyphs, including the , terminal, spur, or other elements of the cross stroke.

Also known as a crossbar, and cross stroke.

Ascent

A font's maximum distance above the baseline.

bcp (Bézier Control Point)

A Bézier Control Point is one of two points which guide a Bézier Curve.

atm (Adobe Type Manager)

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Windows .fnt

format is a single font at a specific resolution and size.

Windows .fon

format is a library of individual .fnt files.

Beak

A type of decorative stroke or sharp spur at the end of the arm of a letter, connected to the arm by the terminal.

Similar to a spur or a serif, but usually more pronounced.

Black Width

the distance from the leftmost to the rightmost of a letterform not including the white space surrounding the image

bmp (Basic Multilingual Plane)

The portion of Unicode's codespace in which all of the most commonly used characters are encoded, corresponding to codepoints U+0000 to U+FFF.

Also known as Plane 0.

bom (Byte Order Mark)

The Unicode character U+FEFF ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE when used as the first character in a UTF-16 or UTF-32 plain text file to indicate the byte serialization order, i.e. whether the least significant byte comes first (little-endian) or the most significant byte comes first (big-endian). Byte order is not an issue for UTF-8, though the bom is sometimes added to the beginning of UTF-8 encoded files as an encoding signature that applications can look for to detect that the file is encoded in UTF-8.

Boustrophedon

A way of writing in which successive lines of text alternate between left-to-right and right-to-left directionality.

Adjacent Caps

Decorative initial caps (capital letters) at the start of a paragraph that sit outside the left margin. As with any initial cap, the size and placement of this letter is designed to draw readers into the narrative.

Also referred to as drop caps, and dropped caps.

Adjacent caps are another specific style or placement of initial caps, as are raised caps.

Adjacent Caps

Decorative intial caps that sit at the start of a paragraph outside of the left margin.

atm (Adobe Type Manager)

atm is software that allows earlier versions of Windows to display Type 1 and Multiple Master fonts on screen. The latest (and discontinued) version is atm Deluxe, and it allows users to arrange fonts in folders that can be turned on and off, provides more control over printing font samples, and also works with TrueType fonts.

Note: Windows XP does not reguire atm to display standard Type 1, however it does require it to use multiple master fonts.

atm Light (Adobe Type Manager Light)

atm Light .

Arabic Numbers

A numeral from 0 to 9 that can be set as Old Style, or Lining Figures.

Advance Width

a glyph's horizontal distance including the white space on either side. THE BLACKWIDTH IMG EXAMPLE APPLIES HERE TOOO

aa (Authors Alteration)

Used in proofing as an indication that changes are requested, and not due to printer's error.

Arc of the Stem

A curved stroke that is continuous with a straight stem, not a bowl; examples: bottom of "j", t", f", a", and u". Also called a shoulder.

Apple GX

Another term for Apple Quickdraw GX.

Apple Quickdraw GX/dfn>

Apple's replacement for their Quickdraw graphics engine and Printing Manager, released in 1995.

Completely replaced the traditional Macintosh printing architecture, as well as introduced a repackaging of Type 1 TrueType fonts.

Bitmap Font

Type of font format that describes each letter or symbol as a row of dots, which can quickly and easily be reproduced on a computer screen; this results in atrocious scaling, causing rough edges and/jaggies. Bitmap fonts have almost entirely been replaced by outline fonts.

Early versions of Windows used bitmap fonts, including the .fon format.

bdf (Bitmap Distribution Format)

bdf is one of the most common bitmap font formats, consisting of human-readable ascii text, and bitmaps embedded in hex codes.

Barb

Another name for a spur.

Big 5

A de facto, Taiwanese character set used for Traditional Chinese.

Bullet

A dot or other special character placed at the left of items in a list to show that they are invidual, but related points

Also known as a bullet point.

Back Matter

Book information that is placed after the text copy, including the index, glossary, bibliography, and appendix.

Bad Break

The presence of widows/orphans in text copy, or a break that does not make sense of the phrasing of a line of copy, resulting in awkward reading.

Banner

The type design of the name of a repetitive publication, like a magazine, newspaper, or a newsletter.

Bitmap Font

Bitmap fonts are fonts that store each glyph as an array (that is, a bitmap); bitmap fonts are simply collections of raster images of glyphs.

Bitmap fonts use the .fon file extension.

Baseline

The baseline is the horizontal line on which the (latin, greek, cyrillic) letters sit. The baseline will probably be in a different place for different scripts. In Indic scripts most letters descend below the baseline. In cjk scripts there is also a vertical baseline usually in the middle of the character. See also X-height, Cap-height, Ascender, Descender, Overshoot.

Bézier Curve

A parametric curve frequently used in computer graphics; in vector graphics, they are used to model smooth curves that can be scaled indefinitely. Combinations of linked Bézier curves in image manipulation programs are called paths.

Bézier curves are also used in the time domain, particularly for animation and interface design, e.g. a Bézier curve can be used to specify the velocity over time of an object such as an icon moving from A to B, rather than simply moving at a fixed number of pixels per step.

Bézier splines

In computer graphics, higher degree curves are more computationally expensive to evaluate. When complex shapes are needed, low order Bézier curves are patched together, producing a Bézier splines. Commonly referred to as a path in svg and in Illustrator, CorelDraw, and Inkscape.

Bleed

An area of text/graphics that extend beyond the edge of the document. Commercial printers typically trim the paper after printing to create bleeds.

Black-letter

Another name for blackletter.

Blackletter

These heavy, black typefaces (whose capital letters are often ornate) were the very first metal type. The earliest of these were from the Gutenberg workshop and were copies of letters found in handwritten manuscripts.

Another name for black-letter.

Any of various type families based on medieval handwriting. See also gothic.

Book List

A complete publication's list of individual documents that make it up.

bmp (Basic Multilingual Plane)

The first 65536 code points of Unicode. These contain most of the ordinary characters in the world.

Bold

A common font style. The stems of the characters are wider than in the normal font, given the letters a darker impression.

Bounce

Alternating characters up and down.

Boustrophedon

Writing "as the ox plows", that is alternating between left to right and right to left. Early alphabets (Old Canaanite, and the very early greek writings (and, surprisingly, fuþark)) used this. Often the right to left glyphs would be mirrors of the left to right ones.

Writing with alternating lines written in opposite directions, where one line will be written left to right, and the next line will have its letters reserved, written from right to left.

Bracketed Serif

A serif in which the transition from stem stroke to the serif stroke is one continuous stroke. Serifs can have differing degrees of bracketing.

Ball Terminal

A type of terminal where a combination of a dot (tail dot) or circular stroke and the curved bit (hook) at the end of some tails and the end of some arms, like in "a", "c", and "f".

Beak Terminal

A type of terminal that refers to the sharp spur or beak at the end of a letterform's arm and the curved bit (terminal) between the beak and arm.

Cap Height

The height of capital letters, as measured from the baseline to the top of a majuscule character.

This may or may not be the same as the height of ascenders.

cff (Compact Font Format)

A lossless compaction of the Type 1 format using Type 2 charstrings; designed to use less storage space than Type 1 fonts, by using operators with multiple arguments, various predefined default values, more efficient allotment of encoding values, and shared subroutines within a family of fonts.

Also known as Type 2 font format, and cff/Type 2 font format.

Character

A unique symbol of a writing system such as an alphabet, for example, "b" is the second character of the English alphabet.

Character Collection

A well-defined group of symbols typically used for the support of one or more languages. In a "coded" character set, each character is assigned to a specific numbered slot within the whole set. A "non-coded" character set is an unordered group of characters.

A well-defined group of characters whose order (or encoding) has not been fixed. Character collection is typically used interchangeably with "non-coded character set".

cid Format

A Postscript-based font format which can support a large number of characters; large number's maximum is 65,536 characters.

cjk

Collective term referring to the common features of the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean writing systems.

Code Page

A system vendor's implementation of a character set; typically abbreviated as cp. One example is Code page 1252 (or CP1252), which is Microsoft's implementation/extension of the standard character set ISO 8859-1, aka Latin-1.

Cat's Ear

Another name for a spur.

cvt (Control Value Table)

Contains key measurements (control values) used amongst several glyphs in a TrueType font, helping to maintain consistency.

Cap-Line

The imaginary line which rules along the top of capital letters.

Connotation

The associations a particular font brings to the readers interaction with it; what it reminds the reader of, the feelings or thoughts that arise when looking at it, etc.

Case Fraction

Metal type fractions ready-made as complete characters, where each character is referred to as a single sort, as opposed to built-up fractions that the compositor constructs using individual characters like superior/inferior numerals and the fraction bar.

These differ from piece fractions, which are constructed from two pieces in Metal Type, the fraction bar being paired with either the denominator/numerator.

For digital and phototypesetting, case fraction has a few, very different, and confusing meanings, that results in different interpretations of the spec, like the web before the w3c. Example: some manufacturers interpret case fraction to only mean horizontal fractions made up as complete characters, while others interpret case fraction as both horizontal and diagonal fractions ("¾").

Also known as Built-up Fraction, Diagonal Fraction, Horizontal Fraction, and Piece Fraction.

Capital Height

Another term for H height.

Capital Numerals

Another term for lining numerals.

Capital Figures

Another term for lining numerals.

Capitals

Another term for capital letters.

Capital Letters

Derived from inscriptional forms of the alphabet which the Romans adopted from the Etruscans. One distinguishing feature of capital letters is that they are of uniform height; the absence of ascenders or descenders (generally) is anothe feature of the uppercase. These inscriptional forms of the alphabet were also the basis for serveral writing hands that folllowed, including square capitals and uncial lettering.

Capital letters are a feature of the Greek, Roman, Armenian, and Cyrillic alphabets, which are classified as bicameral because they do contain two distinct cases.

Also called majuscule or uppercase.

The large letters of the Latin alphabet ("", "", "", "", "", etc.) that are based on classical Roman stone-carved lettering.

Also known as capitals, uppercase letters, majuscules

Caps

Another term for capitals.

Centerline

An imaginary line in photo/digital type that vertically bisects a character's width, including the spaces that type designers assign to either side of a character as part of its design. Often used as a design aid when combining floating accents with letters.

A centerline in Metal Type refers to a horizontal line extending from the center of the matrix, and measured from top to bottom. The centerline provides a basis to make other measurements from it as well.

Chancery Script

A style of handwriting that was used by scribes during the Renaissance in papal courts; typically written at a slight slope from the vertical (but sometimes upright), it is characterized by lowercase letters that have narrow and angular forms.

Typefaces based on chancery script style include Bembo Italic, Centaur Italic, Poetica, and Zapf Chancery.

Character

Also known as a sort, a term from the era of metal type.

Cicero

http://www.fonts.com/content/learning/fontology/glossary/c#component-glyph

Component Glyph

An individual character that is combined in typesetting with one or more other characters to make up a complete character, like when the numerals and fraction bar is used as a component glyph when typesetting a fraction.

Also known as a reference character.

Compositor

A person who sets type.

Relating to metal type, more narrowly referring to a craftsman who assembled type into desired form(s).

Relating to the digital age, typesetting can have a similar meaning.

Cross Stroke

Another term for crossbar.

Cupped Serif

Another term for cupping.

Cupping

A concave curvature or dip located across the terminals of main strokes in letters/characters; can occur in both serif and sans serif designs.

A serif that has a cupping feature is known as a cupped serif.

Cap-Height

The height of a capital letter above the baseline (with a flat top like "I" as opposed to one with a curved to like "O"). See also X-height, Ascender, Descender, Overshoot, Baseline.

cff (Compact Font Format)

Compact Font Format used within OpenType Postscript fonts.

Character

A character is a Platonic ideal reified into at least one glyph. For example the letter "s" is a character which is reified into several different glyphs: "S", "s", "s", long-s, etc. Note that these glyphs can look fairly different from each other, however although the glyph for an integral sign might be the same as the long-s glyph, these are in fact different characters.

Character set

A character set is an unordered set of characters.

cid

In some cjk PostScript fonts the glyphs are not named but are refered to by a cid number.

cid-keyed font

A PostScript (or OpenType) font designed to hold cjk characters efficiently. More accurately, it is a collection of sub-fonts each with certain common features allowing for font-wide hinting to be crafted for subsets of glyphs to which having something in common. For example, one sub&45;font might hold all the latin letters, another all the kana, and a third all of the kanji.

cjk (Chinese, Japanese, Korean)

Chinese, Japanese, Korean. These three languages require fonts with a huge number of characters. All three share a writing system based on Chinese ideographs (though they have undergone seperate evolution in each country, indeed mainland Chinese fonts are different from those used in Taiwan and Hong Kong).

Japanese and Korean also have phonetic syllabaries. The Japanese have two syllabaries, hiragona and katakana which have about 60 syllables. The Koreans have one syllabary, hangul with tens of thousands of syllables.

cjkv (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese)

Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese. These four languages require fonts with a huge number of characters.

The significance of this grouping of languages is that all have writing systems that use Han ideographic characters.

cldr (Common Locale Data Repository)

An extensive repository of locale data, where a locale is a language, spoken in a particular country, written in a particular script. cldr is designed to provide key building blocks for software to support the world's languages and is hosted by the Unicode consortium.

Condensed

A condensed font is one where the space between the stems of the characters, and the distance between characters themselves has been reduced.

Contrast

A subjective feeling that graphic elements are distinct, yet work well together, providing a feeling of variety without losing harmony.

Within a particular font, contrast refers to the variety of stroke thicknesses that make up the characters.

Cross Stroke

A stroke that is really open on at least one end as on "t" and "f" and "Ð".

trema

Another term for a diaeresis.

Descender

A stem on a lower case letter which extends below the baseline. "p" has a descender. See also X-height, Cap-height, Ascender, Overshoot, Baseline

Descent

In traditional typography the descent of a font was the distance from the bottom of a block of type to the baseline.

Its precise meaning in modern typograph seems to vary with different definers.

Didot Point

The European point. 62 ²/3points per 23.566mm ( 2.66pt/mm or 67.54pt/inch ).

Diacritic

a mark normally used in conjunction with another glyph. In Latin fonts, diacritics are sometimes called 'accents'. In Hebrew and Arabic, diacritics are marks that denote vowels.

Diacritics are the various little dots and squiggles which, in many languages, are written above, below or on top of certain letters of the alphabet to indicate something about their pronunciation. Thus, French has words like été `summer', août `August', ça `that' and père `father'; German has Wörter `words' and tschüss `good-bye'; Spanish has mañana `tomorrow' and ángel `angel'; Norwegian has brød `bread' and frå `from'; Polish has Nza `tear', ^@le `badly' and pica `five'; Turkish has ku^@ `bird' and göz `eye'; Welsh has t^@ `house' and sïo `hiss', and so on. When you are citing a word, a name or a passage from a foreign language which uses diacritics, you should make every effort to reproduce those diacritics faithfully. Fortunately, most word processors can produce at least the commoner diacritics.

Diacritics are loosely called accents.

diaeresis

The diaeresis is a diacritic consisting of two dots "¨" placed over a letter, most commonly a vowel. If that letter is an "i" or a "j", the diacritic replaces the tittle like so, "ï".

Also known as a trema.

dll(Dynamic-Link Library)

A file type in windows and OS/2 os's that contains a commonly used set of functions that can be shared by more than one application or system routine. Extension is Apple Macintosh's equivalent file type.

dsig (Digital Signature)

A way to authenticate the authorship of a file; OpenType and TrueType fonts are capable of being signed with a digital signature as the signature is stored in an OpenType Table named dsig.

Double-Storey a

A lowercase "a" comprised of a closed bowl and a stem with a finial arm over the bowl creating a partially enclosed area above the bowl (aperture).

Students learning to write in print use a letterform more similar to a cursive "a"; it has a bowl and stem, but no finial over the top.

Double-Storey a provides a technique to differentiate true italic from fake or software-slanted fonts. Typically it is found in upright roman fonts, and although it is there, the true italic version renders with the single-storey a, which is a bowl without finial arm. An italicized double-storey a is almost always a fake italic.

Also known as upright finial a.

Double-Storey g

A lowercase "g" comprised of a closed bowl with ear and a closed/paritally closed loop that is connected to the bowl via a link. A regular or "single storey" g has a bowl, stem, and a tail.

Double-storey g style is common in typesetting; it has certain similarities to a cursive "g"; for handwritten print, it's rare to find the ear and the tail not in a closed loop.

Double Byte

Typically used to refer to a character set that supports more than 256 characters. Consisting of 16 bits, two bytes (or octets) can support numbers ranging from 0 to 65,535, providing 65,536 unique numeric values.

Double-byte Language

Note: technically inaccurate and outdate term, typically used to refer to East Asian languages with large character sets, like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

Dropped Caps

Dropped caps are a specific style or placement of decorative initial caps (capital letters) at the start of a paragraph that drop into a space created within the first new lines of the text.

Like all initial caps, size and placement of the letter is designed to draw readers into the narrative.

Also known as drop caps.

Em

is a value equal to the current point size; in print shops, ems are referred to as mutton, to distinguish them from ens.

En

one half of an em; print shops commonly refere to ens as nuts, to distinguish them from ems.

Enlarged Capitals

Enlarged capitals, also called versals, commonly mark the entrance to a chapter in a book or an article in a magazine, inviting the reader to come inside.

Features

differences that make fonts unique; features can be heights of the letter groups, stems or rounds of a group, and serifs

Flat Height

the top of the flat characters in a group of characters, like the uppercase H height.

Font

traditionally, fonts were defined as a specific typeface style at a specific point size (from letterpress printing), such as a 7 point Akzidenz-Grotesk Light. The modern definition of font is that it is a member of a typeface family. Example, Times New Roman Italic is a font/font file in Times New Roman typeface family.

Fraktur

traditional Blackletter type style used in German script.

Full Stop

Another name for period.

Glyph

an image in a font file; for comparison, a lowercase 'a' is a character. OpenType and AAT allow for several glyphs that are a lowercase 'a' in a font file.

Glyph Index

digital font file glyphs are assigned numbers (from 0) that are used by tables and instructions for accessing glyphs

Ear

Typically found on the lowercase "g", an ear is a decorative flourish almost always on the upper right side of the bowl. Similar to a serif, ears can be a distinctive, identifying element for a typeface.

Encoding

When used in the context of fonts, refers to the specific ordering (sequencing) of the components of a character set or character collection.

em

A linear unit equal to the point size of the font. In a 10 point font, the em will be 10 points. An em-space is white-space that is as wide as the point size. An em-dash is a horizontal bar that is as wide as the point size.

An em-square is a square one em to each side. In traditional typograph (when each letter was cast in metal) the glyph had to be drawn within the em-square.

em unit

In a scalable font the "em" is subdivided into units. In a postscript font there are usually 1000 units to the em. In a TrueType font there might be 512, 1024 or 2048 units to the em. In an Ikarus font there are 15,000 units. PfaEdit uses these units as the basis of its coordinate system.

en

One half of an "em".

Encoding

An encoding is a mapping from a set of bytes onto a character set. It is what determines which byte sequence represents which character. The words "encoding" and "character set" are often used synonymously. The specification for ascii specifies both a character set and an encoding. But cjk character sets often have multiple encodings for the character set (end multiple character sets for some encodings).

In more complicated cases it is possible to have multiple glyphs associated with each character (as in arabic where most characters have at least 4 different glyphs) and the client program must pick the appropriate glyph for the character in the current context.

Even-Odd Fill Rule

To determine if a pixel should be filled using this rule, draw a line from the pixel to infinity (in any direction) then count the number of times contours cross this line. If that number is odd then fill the point, if it is even then do not fill the point. This method is used by postscript rasterizers after level 2.0 of PostScript. See Also Non-Zero Winding Number Fill.

Expanded

A typeface whose letters have been made wider without visually adding weight.

Extended

An extended font is one where the space between the stems of the characters, and the distance between characters themselves has been increased.

Egyptian

A typeface style with either slab or square serifs, that lack contrast (i.e.), in a serif face, thick serifs and stems that are normally thin are fat).

Also known as Western faces since they are reminiscent of the Old American West; these are made up of human forms and floral figures.

ebdt (Embedded Bitmap Data Table)

A TrueType/OpenType table containing any bitmap strikes for the font, which are used for glyphs that would be simply too complicated too hint, or simply to re-use old bitmap fonts in new environments.

eblc (Embedded Bitmap Location Table)

A TrueType/OpenType table that describes the ebdt.

eblc (Embedded Bitmap Scaling Table)

A TrueType/OpenType table that describes how the bitmaps in the ebdt may be scaled.

Faux Cyrillic

Faux Cyrillic typography is a common Western trope that uses Cyrillic letters in Latin text to evoke the Soviet Union (Russia), regardless of whether the letters are phonetic matches. For example, "Я" and "И", giving "ЯUSSIAИ". Other examples include "Ш" for W, "Ц" for U, "Я/Г" for R/r, "Ф" for O, "Д" for A, "Б" or "Ь" or "Ъ" for B/b, "3" or "Э" or Ё for E, "☭" for G, and "Ч" or "У" for Y.

Also known as pseudo-Cyrillic, pseudo-Russian, or faux Russian.

Faux Formatting

Automated formatting performed by computers to "fake" styles of fonts such as bold, italic (sloped roman), small caps, or condensed from a single font that either is not linked to or does not contain true versions of these types of formatting.

Finial

A finial is a part of a letter that is usually a somewhat tapered curved end on letters, like at the bottom of "C" or "e" and the top of the double-storey a.

Finials are also defined as a swash or ornamental flourish, like an extended serif, ascender, or descender, often added as a variation to come characters in a typeface.

Also known as a terminal.

Fixed-pitch

These heavy, black typefaces (whose capital letters are often ornate) were the very first metal type. The earliest of these were from the Gutenberg workshop and were copies of letters found in handwritten manuscripts. Also known as "Old English."

Family

Another term for font family.

Flex

A Type 1 font method of automatically suppressing minor details (cupped serifs) that will not scale for print at small sies. These minor details are automatically reinstated in higher resolutions or at larger sizes.

Font

A collection of glyphs, generally with at least one glyph associated with each character in the font's character set, often with an encoding.

A font contains much of the information needed to turn a sequence of bytes into a set of pictures representing the characters specified by those bytes.

In traditional typesetting a font was a collection of little blocks of metal each with a graven image of a letter on it. Traditionally there was a different font for each point-size.

Also known as a fount.

Font Family

A collection of related fonts. Often including plain, italic and bold styles.

FreeType

A library for rasterizing fonts. Used extensively in PfaEdit to understand the behavior of truetype fonts.

Fractur

The old black letter writing style used in Germany up until the end of world war II. See also gothic.

gpos (Glyph Positioning)

Provides precise control over glyph placement for sophisticated text layout and rendering in each script and language system that a font supports.

Glyph

A glyph is an image, often asociated with one or several characters. So the glyph used to draw "f" is associated with the character f, while the glyph for the "fi" ligature is associated with both f and i. In simple latin fonts the association is often one to one (there is exactly one glyph for each character), while in more complex fonts or scripts there may be several glyphs per character (In renaissance printing the letter "s" had two glyphs associated with it, one, the long-s, was used initially and medially, the other, the short-s, was used only at the end of words). And in the ligatures one glyph is associated with two or more characters.

Fonts are collections of glyphs with some form of mapping from character to glyph.

Grid Fitting

Before TrueType glyphs are rasterized they go through a process called grid fitting where a tiny program (associated with each glyph) is run which moves the points on the glyph's outlines around until they fit the pixel grid better.

Gothic

The German monks at the time of Gutenburg used a black-letter writing style, and he copied their handwriting in his typefaces for printing. Italian type designers (after printing spread south) sneered at the style, prefering the type designs left by the romans. As a term of contempt they used the word gothic, the style of the goths who helped destroy the roman empire.

Grotesque

See sans-serif.

Gaiji Characters

Generally used to reference symbols not supported by a particular Japanese character set, however is most often used to reference kanji characters.

gbk

Standard character set used in China, including all (approximately 20,000) the ideographic characters in the Unified cjk range of Unicode.

"gb" abbreviates Guojia Biaozhun ((国家标准)), literally national standard in Chinese, and "K" stands for Kuozhan, which is Chinese for extension.

Gothic

Common style in cjk fonts that is considered to be stylistically similar to sans-serif fonts.

Gothic

In modern times, Gothic referes to sans serif monoweight letters, for example "Letter Gothic". These tend to have minimal contrast of thick and thin lines, no ornamentation, yet still retaining the intensiv boldness of the traditional Gothic style.

In ad 1450, after the Invention of Typography by Gutenberg, traditional Gothic style of lettering fell under the shadow of Venetian Old Style typography.

Geometric

Serif or sans serif designs composed of visually geometric character shapes, like "Lubalin Graph", "Avant Garde", and "Futura".

Greeked Text

Simulated text that shows the position of the actual text on the page; text is greeked in order to speed the screen display.

Hints

Help the rasterizer to draw a glyph well at small pointsizes.

Humanist

Generally speaking, a typeface with a left-leaning axis; specifically, a calligraphic or Venetian font.

Optima is a Humanist Sans Serif font.

Descent

A font's maximum distance below the baseline.

Descender

The part of lowercase letters ("y", "p", and "q") that descend below the baseline of the other lowercase letters in a font face.

In some font faces, the uppercase "J" and "Q" also descend below the baseline.

Descender Line

The lowest possible line that a character's descenders extend to; the lowest possible line below this "j", and this "y".

Hairline

Refers to the thinnest lines it is possible to draw.

Hanging Indent

A document style in which the first line of a paragraph is aligned with the left margin, and the remaining lines are all indented an equal amount.

Also known as outdenting.

Headline Font

A font that has specifically been designed for display at large point sizes (headlines); they typically exclude rare(r) symbols and punctuations marks.

Han Characters

The characters of the Chinese writing system whose origin is directly traceable to pictographic symbols; aka ideographs.

Hangul

The syllabary (or syllabic alphabet) used to write the Korean language.

Hanja

Korean name for Chinese characters.

Hanzi

Mandarin Chinese name for Chinese characters

Hei

Common Chinese name for gothic style.

Hiragana

One of the syllabic alphabets used in writing Japanese; most commonly used for the variable grammatical elements in Japanese sentences, as well as for words which have no kanji symbols.

Horizontal Writing

cjk languages can be written from left to right in horizontal lines in a manner similar to languages written in the Latin alphabet, however cjk languages have been written traditionally in vertical columns.

Hanging Figures

Also known as lowercase figures and old style.

Ideographic

Referring to ideographic characters as those of Chines.

Ideographic Character

The non-alphabet characters of the Chinese writing system whose origin is directly traceable to pictographic symbols

Initial Caps

Oversized letters at the start of some text; oftentimes these letters are set in a different, sometimes highly ornate, decorative letter. Initial caps are used to draw attention to the text and draw the reader into the narrative.

Styles of initial caps:

• Adjacent Caps drop to the side.
• Dropped Caps are the most familiar style dropped into indented lines.
• Raised Caps are simply larger letters at the start of the paragraph.

Also known as drop cap, or dropped cap.

Initial

A letter at the beginning of a word, chapter, or a paragraph that is larger than the rest of the text; typically several lines in height, and sometimes ornately decorated.

Initium

Also knowns as Historiated Initials.

Historiated Initials

An enlarged letter at the beginning of a paragraph or section of text, which contains a picture. A inhabited initial contains figures (human or animal) that are decorative only, without forming a subject, whereas in a historiated initial there is no identifiable figure or a specific scene.

Historiated caps

An initial cap that contains a picture element. Historiated caps help mark the start of a new idea in text, as well as act as place markers in text.

ime (Input Method Editor)

A special form of keyboard input method that makes use of additional windows for character editing or selection in order to facilitate keyboard entry of writing systems with very large character sets.

Italic

A slanted style of a font, generally used for emphasis.

Italic differs from Oblique in that the transformation from the plain to the slanted form involves more than just skewing the letterforms. Generally the lower-case a changes to a, the serifs on lower-case letters like i (i) change, and the font generally gains a freer look to it.

Ideograph

The combination of two or more pictographs to represent a concept.

Another name for a ideogram.

Indents

A temporary inward offset from the margin setting.

Jumplines

Text at the beginning/end of an article indicating on what page the article is continued.

Kerning

When the default spacing between two characters is inapproriate the font may include extra information to indicate that when a given character (say "T") is followed by another character (say "o") then the advance width of the "T" should be adjusted by a certain amount to make for a more pleasing display.

The process of adjusting the inter-character spacing of specific pairs of glpyhs. Kerning information adds an amount of information between pairs of glyphs in the horizontal plane. Kerning can be applied afer the advance width of a glpyh have been calculated from the horizontal metrics of the glyphs in question.

Kerning can be a positive or negative value.

Kern pair

A pair of characters for which kerning information has been specified.

Latin script

Often used interchangeably with Roman script.

Left Side Bearing

The horizontal distance from a character's origin to its leftmost extent. This may be negative or positive.

The white space at the left edge of a glyph's visual representation, or more specifically, the distance between the current horizontal display position and the left edge of the glyph's bounding box. A positive indicates white space between the glyph and the previous one; a negative indicates overlap or overhang between them.

Letter Spacing

Letter spacing is another name for tracking, and track kerning.

lgc (Latin, Greek, Cyrillic)

Latin, Greek, Cyrillic. These three alphabets have evolved side by side over the last few thousand years. The letter forms are very similar (and some letters are shared). Many concepts such as "lower case", "italic" are applicable to these three alphabets and not to any others.

Ligature

A single glyph which is composed of two adjacent characters. A common example in the latin script is the "fi" ligature which has a nicer feel to it than the sequence.

Lining Numerals

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Loop

In a double-storey a, the loop is the enclosed or partially enclosed counter between the baseline that is connected to the bowl by a link. The enclosed/partially enclosed extenders on cursive "p", "b" "l", and similar letters are also called loops. Both uppercase/lowercase cursive letters typically have extra loops and flourishes.

The small curve or hook at the end of a "j" or "q" are often times called loops even thought they really are not.

Legibility

A characteristic of type indicating how recognizable a typeface's characters are, most importantly in text size(s). Often measured by the speed in which the reader recognizes characters; works in cahoots with readability, amongst other -ilities.

Logotype

Symbolic design including letterforms and/or pictorial imagery; typically used to represent a company, organization, brand, etc., Also referred to as a logo.

In metal type design, a logotype is two letters that were cast together into one piece of type to minimalize the space between them. Logotyping also prevents overhangs from being damaged (breaking off), like the combinations "Ta" and "Vo".

Linecasting

Another term for metal type.

Linéal

Another term for sans serif.

Logo

Also known as a logotype.

Logo

A combination of characters and/or graphics to create a single design that is used to identify a company or organization. it is often trademarked and is always included on all company printed materials and ads.

Kicker

A short, underlined phrase introducing a headline.

Also known as a teaser.

Kana

The collective name for the two syllabic alphabets (hiragana and katakana) used in writing Japanese.

Kanji

The Japanese name for Chinese characters; also written as "kanzi".

Katakana

One of the syllabic alphabets used in writing Japanese. Katakana is most commonly used for foreign words and names.

Lining Numerals

Lining numerals take up uniform widths of space, enabling the numbers to line up when tabulated in columns. Lining numerals are the same height as capital letters, so they can appear big and bulky when appearing in running text.

Lining Font

A font in which all the letters are capital letters, and also has neither ascenders or descenders. Therefore it's point size is the distance from the baseline to the cap height.

Link

Small, typically curved stroke that connects the bowl and loop of a double-storey g.

Also known as a neck, and a terminal.

Lowercase

Vernacular for the minuscule letterforms of bi-cameral alphabets.

The term lowercase derives from back in the day, from the physical cases of metal type a typesetter would pick individual pieces of type - so called sorts - from, to compose lines of text in his composing stick. The pieces of type were divided into two cases, whereas the most used case was placed nearest to the typesetter and called the lower case, and the least used case was placed further way from the type setter, hence upper case. The lowercase contained the minuscule sorts and the uppercase contained the majuscule parts.

Lowercase Figures

Also known as hanging figures and old style.

Mean Line

Another term for x-height.

Metrics

Numerical information about a font such as ascent, descent, leading, character widths, and kerning, but not the actual shapes that make up the glyphs.

Mid-Capitals

A larger form of small capitals, whereas small capitals come to the top of the x-height of their roman counterparts, mid-capitals are slightly larger so that the overall difference between the small caps and roman is more subtle, and therefore more unified. Mid-capitals simply refers to striking a balance between the x-height and the cap height.

Also known as medium capitals.

Monospace

A font in which all characters have the same advance width. These are sometimes called typewriter fonts.

Multiple Master Font

A multiple master font is a PostScript font schema which defines an infinite number of related fonts. Multiple master fonts can vary along several axes, for example you might have a multiple master which defined both different weights and different widths of a font family, it could be used to generate: Normal, Semi-Bold, Bold, Condensed, Expanded, Bold-Condensed, etc.

Note: Adobe is no longer developing multiple master fonts.

Monospaced Type

Like characters on a typewriter, they all have the same width and take up the same amount of space. Using monospaced type allows text to be set in vertical rowws without leaving a ragged appearance, as opposed to a proportional type.

Majuscule

Latin capital letters; Latin lower case letters are miniscule.

Miniscule

Latin lowercase letters; Latin uppercase letters are majuscule.

Mincho

Common style of Japanese fonts considered to be stylistically similar to serif fonts.

Myeongjo

Common style of Korean fonts considered to be stylistically similar to serif fonts.

Non-Zero Winding Number Fill Rule

To determine if a pixel should be filled using this rule draw a line from here to infinity (in any direction) and count the number of times contours cross this line. If the contour crosses the line in a clockwise direction add 1, of the contour crosses in a counter clockwise direction subtract one. If the result is non-zero then fill the pixel. If it is zero leave it blank. This method is used by truetype and older (before version 2) postscript rasterizers. See Also Even-Odd Fill Rule.

Normal

Most used version of Roman font

Also known as Regular

nfnt (New FoNT)

Macintosh font resource that contains your bitmap screen font; they ahve a wider range of font identification numbers than the older fonts. nfnts opened up another 16,000 font id numbers upon being introduced by Apple with the Macintosh Plus.

pfm (Printer Font Metrics)

A file that contains information about a single Type 1 font. pfm files are required for installing Type 1 fonts on Windows.

Originally designed for single-byte fonts, pfms provide atm and other software with key font-specific information that is necessary for installation and use in Windows. The pfm file doesn't contain a font itself.

Pictograph

An elementary picture symbol representing a noun or object.

Proportional Type

Type whose character widths vary according to the features of the letters, as opposed to monospaced type.

Octet

aka a byte, an octet consists of eight bits, and can represent numeric values ranging from 0-255.

ofl (Open Font License)

Actually the SIL Open Font License.

ofl shares the same acronym with the open font library, so in order to avoid confusion the Open Font Library switched to oflb.

oflb (Open Font Library)

The open font library shares the same initals as open font license; in order to avoid confusion it adopted a different acrony: oflb.

Outdenting

Another term for a hanging indent.

Oblique

The (/) is another name for the slash

Old Style

Also known as lowercase figures and hanging figures.

OpenType

A type of font. It is an attempt to merge postscript and truetype fonts into one specification.

An opentype font may contain either a truetype or a postscript font inside it.

It contains many of the same data tables for information like encodings that were present in truetype fonts. It also can contain additional information such as positional glyph selection (needed for arabic), ligatures, etc.

Type Tables

Each opentype font contains a collection of tables each of which contains a certain kind of information.

Oblique

A slanted style of a font, generally used for emphasis.

Oblique differs from Italic in that the transformation from the plain to the slanted form involves just skewing the letterforms.

Old Style

A style of font that is characterized by having variations in stroke width, bracketed serifs, high contrast, and a diagonal stroke. Garamond, Janson, and Caslon are all old style fonts.

Orphan

A paragraph-opening line that appears by itself at the bottom of a page/column, or a word, part of a word, or very short line that appears by itself at the end of a paragraph. Orphans result in too much white space between paragraphs or at the bottom of a page.

Period

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ppem (Pixel Per Em)

ppem are non-resolution dependent unit of measure; they're actually calculated via: ppem = pt size * resolution/72.

Permanent Font

A font that, upon being downloaded to a PostScript printer, will remain its memory until it has its power supply shut off.

Printer Font

A font that is stored permanently in a PostScript printer. When the font is used in a document, rather than download the font the printer font is substituted to speed up printing.

weft (Web Font Embedding Technology)

Proprietary ie technology for viewing fonts in browsers rendered by the almighty Trident.

Optical Kerning

An algorithmic approach to kerning; as applied by InDesign's implementation, kerning information from the font is ignored and an algorithim instead calculates kerning values that are then applied on the fly.

Overshoot

In order for the curved shape of the "O" to appear to be the same height as the flat top of the "I" it tends to "overshoot" the cap-height (or x-height, or undershoot the baseline) by about 3% of the cap-height (or x-height). For a triangular shape (such as "A") the overshoot is even greater, perhaps 5%.

These guidelines are based on the way the eye works and the optical illusions it generates and are taken from Peter Karow's Digital Formats for Typefaces, p. 26).

See also X-height, Cap-height, Ascender, Descender, Baseline.

Panose

A system for describing fonts. See AGFA's PANOSE classification metrics guide and MicroSoft's PANOSE classification in Windows.

Pica

point

The Anglo-American point. With 72.27 points per inch ( 2.85pt /mm ).

Point

A point is a unit of measurement. There were two different definitions for "point" in common usage before the advent of computers. The one in use in the Anglo-Saxon printing world was the "pica point" with 72.27 points per inch ( 2.85pt /mm ), while the one used in Europe was the didot point with 62 ²/3 points per 23.566mm ( 2.66pt/mm or 67.54pt/inch).

These two points were so arranged that text at a given point-size would have approximately the same cap-height in both systems, the didot point would have extra white-space above the capitals to contain the accents present in most non-English Latin based scripts.

This has the interesting side effect that a font designed for European usage should have a smaller proportion of the vertical em given over to the text body. Computer fonts tend to ignore this, so presumably european printers now set with more leading.

Point Size

In traditional typography a 10pt font was one where the block of metal for each character was 10 points high.

PostScript

PostScript is a page-layout language used by many printers. The language contains the specifications of several different font formats.

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• Type 1
• Type 2
• Type 3
• Type 0
• Type 42
• cid

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Ragged

The uneven alignment of text lines; the opposite of flush. A text block that is formatted to be evenly aligned (flush) on one side and unevenly aligned (ragged) on the other.

The overall appearance of how the type is spaced in a column.

Rebus

The use of pictures and/or pictographs to represent the syllables of a word.

Recto

The right page of a spread.

Resonance

The overtone of a typeface design based on our connotative experience with it, like historic, romantic, business, exotic, etc.

rip (Raster Image Processor)

Converts fonts and graphics into raster images to be used by the printer to draw onto the page.

Semiautomatic Flow Text

Placement in which the text flows to the bottom of the column and stops with the text icon loaded with the rest of the text.

Spread

Facing pages; made up of an even-numbered page on the left (verso) and an odd-numbered page on the right (recto).

Reverse Type

White characters on a dark background; a great method to grab the reader's attention.

Ragged Left

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Ragged Right

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Range Left

Also known as ragged left.

Range Right

Also known as ragged right.

Ranging Figures

Also known as lining numerals.

Ranging Numerals

Also known as lining numerals.

Radical

The smallest meaningful components out of which an ideographic character is built.

Romaji

The Latin alphabet as used in the context of Japanese writing.

Shift jis

Common Japanese character set consisting of around 7000 characters

Simplified Chinese

Chinese ideographic writing system used in the People's Republic of China and Singapore

Script

A set of symbols used in writing one or more languages. The alphabet, syllabary, and ideographs, are among the most common types of scripts.

Single Byte

Typically used to refer to a character set that supports a maximum of 256 characters. Consisting of eight bits, one byte, or one octet, and can support numbers ranging from 0-255, providing 256 unique numeric values.

Single-Byte Language

Note: technically inaccurate and outdate term, single-byte language is typically used to refer to languages with relatively small character sets, and in contrast to most typical East Asian languages that have large character sets.

Sung

Common Chinese font style stylistically similar to serif.

Syllabic Alphabet

An alphabet whose symbols primarily represent consonant-vowel pairs such as "ba", "fi", "no", po", etc. Examples of syllabic alphabets include hiragana, katakana, and hangul.

Traditional Chinese

Chinese ideographic writing system used primarily in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

ttc (TrueType Collection)

A "bundling" of TrueType fonts that allows them to share common parts without duplication in order to save space. Several Japanese fonts in a ttc may share a common set of kanji characters.

ttf (TrueType Font)

A font in TrueType format.

TrueType Format

A font format that supports a large number (maximum of 65,536) of characters; originally devised by Apple and later extended by Microsoft.

Unicode

Universal, 16-bit standard coded character set for the representation of all human scripts.

Unicode Character

Refers to one of the characters defined in the Unicode Standard; also sometimes used to refer to the numeric value representing a particular character.

Unicode Order

Refers to a set of characters sequentially arranged in compliance with the Unicode Standard.

Unicode Value

Refers to an integer value that lies in the range declared permissible by the Unicode Standard.

Unified cjk

As defined in the Unicode Standard, a range of 20,902 ideographic characters shared by Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

Vertical Form

Certain symbols take on a distinct form when written in a vertical direction.

Raised Caps

Decorative initial caps (capital letters) at the start of a paragraph that sit on a baseline of the first line of text but are noticeably larger, raised above the accompanying text. Like all initial caps, the text and placement of the letter is designed to draw readers into the narrative.

Raised caps are a specific style or placement of intial caps, similar to adjacent caps.

Note: do not change the leading of the character or it could result in gaps between the first and second lines.

Reading Line

A another name for the baseline

Reference Character

Also known as a compontent glyph.

Reference

A reference is a way of storing the outlines of one glyph in another (for example in accented characters).

Reference Lines

In computer-aided type design, vertical lines used as design aids that define the left and right edges of a character's width; this typicall includes spaces on both left/right of the character.

Also known as side bearings, and side spaces.

Relative Units

Units of measurement used in a unit system.

Rivers of White

Also referred to simply as rivers, are gaps in typesetting that appear to run through a paragraph of text, due to a coincidental alignment of spaces. They can occur regardless of spacing settings, but most noticeably with wide inter-word spaces caused by full text justification or monospaced fonts. Less noticable with proportional fonts, due to their narrow spacing. Another cause is the close repetition of a long word or similar words at regular intervals, like "maximization" with "minimization" or "optimization".

Ragged

Typeset copy in which the word spacing is even and the lines of type align vertically in one margin but don't along the other; the vertically aligned margin is "smooth", while the broken margin is "ragged".

Text composed like this is also known as unjustified text, and unjustified composition.

Also known as flush left, and flush right or flush left, ragged right and flush right, ragged left.

In the uk this is also known as range left and range right.

Readability

A characteristic of type indicating that the degree of comfort/ease with which text can be read. Generally measured by comprehension, also by the length of time that a reader can read a passage without strain. Works in cahoots with legibility, amongst other -ilities.

Stroke

The (/) is another name for the slash

A stroke is also used to refer to any single linear element in a character.

Solidus

The (/) is another name for the slash

Shilling Mark

The (/) is another name for the slash

Scratch

The scratch (/) is another name for the slash when it is used for writing fractions.

Slab Serif

See square serif.

Square Serif

A type style that evolved mostly during the nineteenth century. The earliest forms were designed for display, notably with the square-cut serif that is the same optical weight as the stem, such as Vincent Figgins' Antique typeface.

Typically little to no difference in the thickness between the strokes that make up the character, and the serifs are mostly unbracketed.

In Claredon typefaces, serifs are thicker than the stem and sometimes unbracketed, like P.T. Barnum, and Branding Iron.

More modern square serif typefaces include designs based on geometric sans serif models, like Futura (examples: Memphis, and Stymie).

Also known as slab serif, and Egyptian.

Slash

The slash (/) is also referred to as oblique, the virgule, the stroke, and the solidus or the shilling mark.

When the slash is used for writing fractions it is typically called the scratch.

Set Width

the horizontal measure of a letter; set width is the body of the letter plus a sliver of space that protects it from other letters. The width of a letter is intrinsic to the proportions and visual impression of the typeface; altering a typeface's horizontal/vertical scales will change the set width

Spur

Spur is a small bit at the end of certain curved portions of a letterform such as the end(s) of a C, S, or the middle of a G.

Semi-Serif

A post-modernist category of typeface that mixes elements of both the serif and sans-serif forms.

Style-Linked Fonts

Many applications support keyboard shortcuts for accessing a font family's bold and italic styles (Mac: command-B, Windows: control-B, control-I). This technique is style linking and is designed for font familes that contain the four typical styles: regular, italic, bold, and bold italic.

Style-Linking

A feature of the font-face specification, and an extension of style-linked fonts. When a family is style-linked you can refer to it with just one font name, instead of a font name for each individual style.

Another primary advantage of style-linking is that it avoids the fake-bold or fake-italic that a browser could impose on a font.

Square Serif

Square serifs have squared-off serifs on the characters' end strokes.

Standoff

Distance between the edge of the graphic and the graphic boundary that determines how close text will flow.

Stet

Proofreader mark implying "let it stand", used to direct retention of (a word or passage previously ordered to be deleted or omitted from a manuscript or printer's proof) by annotating usually with the word stet.

Stretched Text

Widening text characters, not the spacing between the characters.

Small Caps

More common in seriffed roman typefaces, and typically found in book weights, in both medium and bold.

Small caps are often used in book composition

(TrueType Font File) Tables

Truetype font files are separated into tables, which are sections of similar data.

Track Kerning

Adjusting the letterspacing for a block of text.

Tracking

Overall letterspacing in text; can also be used to tighten/loosen a block of type. Some programs have automatic tracking options that can add/remove small incremenmts of space between characters.

Transitional

A typestyle characterized by modern variations in stroke weight, smoothly-jointed serifs, high contrast, and an almost vertical stress.

Transitional was introduced by John Baskerville in the late eighteenth century.

Uncial

Calligraphic typestyle combining the attributes of uppercase/lowercase letters, using large, rounded letterforms. Derived from "uncus", which is Latin for crooked.

Half-uncial is a related typestyle.

Unit System

A system of measurement used in type design/typesetting where each unit is typically equal to a specific fraction of the em. The size of a unit is relative to the set type size, and therefore the number of units within an em is the same at every type size, but the measurement of the unit changes according to the type size.

After mechanized metal typesetting's creation, unit systems have been used to measure the spaces that characters occupy, the measurement of these spaces being character widths, set widths, and sometimes unit values.

Right Side Bearing

The horizontal distance from a character's rightmost extent to the character's advance width. This may be positive or negative.

The white space at the right edge of a glyph's visual representation, or more specifically, the distance between the display position after a glyph is rendered and the right edge of the glyph's bounding box. A positive indicates white space between the glyph and the following glyph; a negative indicates overlap or overhang between them.

Roman Script

Script based on the alphabet developed by the ancient Romans ("A, B, C, D, E, F, G..."), and used by most European languages, including English, German, French, Czech, Polish, Swedish, Estonian, etc..

Also known as Latin script.

Sans Serif

See the section on serifs.

sbits (Scaler Bitmaps)

Short for "scaler bitmaps", i.e. bitmaps used instead of scaling (and hinting) an outline. A set of sbits at a particular size is called a *strike.

TrueType fonts can contain sbits in the 'EBDT' and 'EBLC' tables (in Windows) or the 'bdat' and 'bloc' tables (in Apple GX).

Script

A script is a character set and associated rules for putting letters together. Latin, arabic, katakana and hanja are all scripts.

sdf (Script Description File)

A maximal collection of characters used for writing languages or for transcribing linguistic data that share common characteristics of appearance, share a common set of typical behaviours, have a common history of development, and that would be identified as being related by some community of users, such as Roman (Latin) script, Arabic script, Cyrillic script, Thai script, Devanagari script, Chinese script, etc.

Serif

Back two thousand years ago when the Romans were carving their letters on stone monuments, they discovered that they could reduce the chance of the stone cracking by adding fine lines at the terminations of the main stems of a character.

These fine lines were called serifs, and came to have an esthetic appeal of their own. Early type designers added them to their fonts for esthetic rather than functional reasons.

At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth, type-designers started designing fonts without serifs. These were initialially called grotesques because their form appeared so strange, they are now generally called sans-serif.

Other writing systems (Hebrew for one) have their own serifs. Hebrew serifs are rather different from latin (cyrillic, greek) serifs; Hebrew serifs only occur at the top of a character.

Sidebearings

The distance between the origina and the left edge of a character (left sidebearing) and the distance between the width line and the right edge of a character (right sidebearing).

Small Caps

Capital or uppercase letters that are a smaller size than regular capitals in a given font. Normally small caps are about the size of a typeface's normal lowercase letters.

Also known as s.c., and Small Capitals.

Use small caps to make text less obtrusive or to add emphasis.

In true small caps fonts, the letters are rewdrawn to take into account optical effects.

Spline

A curved line segment.

Spur

A small bit at the end of curved portions of a letterform such as the end(s) of a "C" or "S" or the middle of "G".

Also known as serif, barb, and a cat's ear.

Spurs are similar to, but typically smaller than a serif or beak.

Stroke

A line which may be expanded in width; or the width of the linear elements that compose characters.

The main diagonal portion of a letterform, such as in "N", "M", and "Y". The stroke is secondary to the main stem(s). Some letterforms with two diagonals, like "A" and "V", have a stem (primary vertical or near-vertical stroke) and a stroke (the main diagonal).

Other letter parts such as the bars, arms, stems, and bowls are collectively referred to as the strokes that make up a letterform.

Style

There are various conventional varients of a font. In probably any writing system the thickness of the stems of the characters may be varied, this is called the weight of a font. Common weights are normal and bold.

In lgc alphabets an italic (or oblique) style has arisen and is used for emphasis.

Fonts are often compressed into a condensed style, or expanded out into an extended style.

Various other styles are in occasional use: underline, overstrike, outline, shadow.

A style is a stylistic variation derived from the typeface design. Within the Latin script the most used styles are roman or upright, italic or sloped, bold or fat, and Bold Italic or sloped and fat. Other styles can be black or very fat, light or thin.

Syllabary

A syllabary is a phonetic writing system like an alphabet. Unlike an alphabet the sound-unit which is written is a syllable rather than a letter. In Japanese KataKana the sound "ka" is represented by one glyph. Syllabaries tend to be bigger than alphabets (KataKana requires about 60 different characters, while the Korean Hangul requires tens of thousands).

Tail

The descending, often decorative stroke on the letter "Q", or the descending, often curved diagonal stroke on "K" or "R" is known as the tail.

The descender on "g", "j", "p", "q", and "y" are also called tails.

The Strong diagonal strokes on "K", "k", and "R" are all examples of tails.

Transient Font

A font which only stays in the printer's memory until the current document is finished printing.

Tracking

Another name for letter spacing.

Track Kerning

Another name for letter spacing.

True Italic

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True Type

A type of font invented by Apple and shared with MicroSoft. It specifies outlines with 2 degree Bézier curves, contains inovative hinting controls, and an expandable series of tables for containing whatever additional information is deemed imported to the font.

Apple and Adobe/MicroSoft have expanded these tables in different ways, although attempting to achieve the same effect.

TrueType Tables

Each truetype font contains a collection of tables each of which contains a certain kind of information.

Type 1

This is the old standard for PostScript fonts. Such a font generally has the extension .pfb (or .pfa). A type 1 font is limitted to a one byte encoding (ie. only 256 characters may be encoded).

Type 2

A type of PostScript font, used within OpenType font wrappers. It is almost the same as Type 1, but has a few extensions and a more compact format.

Type 3

This format allows full postscript within the font, but it means that no hints are allowed, so these fonts will not look as nice at small point-sizes. Also most rasterizers are incapable of dealing with them. A type 0 font is limitted to a one byte encoding (ie. only 256 characters may be encoded).

Type 0

This format is used for collecting many sub-fonts (of Type 1 or Type 3) into one big font, and was used for cjk or Unicode fonts.

Type 42

A TrueType font wrapped up in PostScript. Sort of the opposite from OpenType.

A hybrid Postscript font for use on a PostScript printer, created by putting a wrapper around a TrueType font.

cid

This format is used for cjk fonts with large numbers of glyphs.

Typeface

a collection of fonts within a family; for example, Times New Roman is a typeface, Times New Roman Italic is a font.

Also known as a font-family

The term typeface is used to describe a particular design of a collection of letterforms and other glyphs that make up the fonts in which the typeface is materialized. A typeface thus normally consists of a number of variations on style and weight, all derived from the same design. Each instance of a style and weight is most often stored in a font-file.

Typographic Color

The apparent blackness of a block of text; color is a function fo the relative thickness of the strokes that make up the characters in a font; basically its weight, as well as its width, point size, and leading, that are used for setting the text.

Typewriter

See Monospace.

U&lc (Uppercase & Lowercase)

Abbreviation for uppercase & lowercase in regards to fonts.

Vulgar Fractions

common fractions; vulgar fraction characters use the fraction bar or solidus and superior and inferior numerals, set horizontally. Vulgar fractions are also referred to as horizontal fractions/shilling fractions.

Terminal

A type of curve; some consider it to be the just the end (straight or curved) of any stroke that doesn't include a serif (which can include serif fonts, such as the little stroke at the end of "n").

Microsoft Typography gives a broader definition that considers tails, links, ears, and loops as terminals.

Ball terminal, and beak terminal are two types of terminals.

Unicode

An encoding character set/encoding which tries to contain all the characters used in the world. See the Unicode consortium for more information..

ufo (Unified Font Object)

A cross-platform, cross-application, human readable, future proof format for storing font data.

ufo official reference.

Unserifed

Another name for sans serif.

Uppercase

The capital letters of an alphabet are uppercase glyphs.

The term uppercase comes from back in the days of metal type, the lesser used capital letters were kept in the harder to reach "upper case", while the more frequently used letters werekept nearer at hand, in the "lower case".

Also known as capitals, capital letters, caps, and big letters.

Virgule

The (/) is another name for the slash

Weight

The weight of a font is how thick (dark) the stems of the characters are. Traditionally weight is named, but recently numbers have been applied to weights.

Thin	100
Extra-Light	200
Light	300
Normal	400
Medium	500
Demi-Bold	600
Bold	700
Heavy	800
Black	900
Nord
Ultra

Width

This is a slightly ambiguous term and is sometimes used to mean the advance width(the distance from the start of this character to the start of the next character), and sometimes used to mean the distance from the left side bearing to the right side bearing.

Widow

A paragraph-ending line that falls at the beginning of the following page/column, thus separated from the rest of the text.

wsi (Writing System Implementations)

Word Space

horizontal white space between words.

usv (Unicode Scalar Value)

A number written as hexadecimal (base 16) value that serves as the codepoint for Unicode characters. Characters in the bmp are written with four hex digits (U+0061, U+AA32, etc.) Characters in supplementary planes use five or six digits.

usp (Unicode Script Processor)

Due to OpenType technical limitations, it is necessary to pre-process strings before applying OpenType smart behaviour. Microsoft uses a particular dll called Uniscribe to perform the pre-processing; Uniscribe does all of the script specific, font generic processing of a string (such as reordering) leaving the font specific processing (such as contextual forms) to the OpenType lookups of a font.

ucs (Universal Character Set)

The coded character set defined by Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646, intended to support all commonly used characters from all writing systems, current and past.

Vertical Writing

In contrast to languages written in the Latin alphabet, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean are often written in vertical columns, proceeding from right to left on the page.

volt (Visual OpenType Layout Tool)

A tool to build OpenType tables and add them to a font.

Visual Order

A way of storing characters so that the order in which they are stored corresponds to the order in wich they appear on the page, as opposed to the order in which they are stored are read. In many cases these are the same, but the distinction is particularly pertinent in bidirectional, or mixed text, as the order in which the characters appear on the page does not necessarily correspond to the order in which they are pronounced. Older legacy font encodings tended to store characters in visual order, but Unicode-encoded fonts use logical order.

Writing System

A strictly regulated method of writing a particular language using one or more scripts. English is written in the Latin (or Roman) alphabet according to a series of rules, whereas Japanese is written using a combination of four scripts: the hiragana and katakana syllabaries, kanji symbols, and romaji (Latin).

X Height

the flat height of the lowercase glyphs, which is typically the same as the top of the lowercase "x".

The height of a lower case letter above the base line (with a flat top like "x" or "z" or "v" as opposed to one with a curved top like ""o" or one with an ascender like "l") . See also Cap-height, Ascender, Descender, Overshoot, Baseline

Also known as a mean line.

x line

A line marking the top of lowercase letters that have no ascenders, such as "x".

The x line serves as the upper boundary of the x-height.