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Typefaces
and fonts
In typography, a typeface is a co-ordinated set of letter designs,
making a complete alphabet, and generally intended to be made
into a font for printing or use on a computer display.
The art of designing typefaces is called type design, being the
occupation of a type designer.
A font (originally fount, from typefoundry) is a set of glyphs
(images) representing the characters from a particular character
set in a particular typeface. In digital fonts, the image of each
character may be encoded either as a bitmap (in a bitmap font)
or by a higher-level description in terms of lines and curves
enclosing space (an outline font, also called "vector font").
The term fount has been used for centuries to refer to the contemporary
technological device used to print in a particular size and typeface
(though in phototype and digital type, it need no longer refer
to a specific size). Virtually all founts were cast in various
lead alloys from the 1450s until the middle of the 20th century.
A few large founts were made of wood, especially in the USA. This
is known as wood type. There was a relatively brief overlapping
period (ca. 1950s-1990s) where photographic technology, known
as phototypesetting, was used; founts came on rolls or discs of
film. From the mid-1980s the move to digital typography has been
relentless and the American spelling has been almost universally
adopted. The term font nowadays almost always refers to a computer
file containing scalable, outline letterforms, usually in one
of several common formats. Some fonts, such as Microsoft's Verdana
are intended primarily for use on computer screens.
Categorization criteria
Fonts can be divided in the categories of serif and sans-serif
fonts. Serifs are the small features at the end of strokes within
letters. A typeface without serifs is called sans-serif (from
French sans: "without"), also referred to as grotesque
(or, in German, grotesk).
There is great variety 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 is 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, they can simply
respect the browser settings of the user, but of those that do,
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.
Proportion
A font where its glyphs are displayed using varying widths is
a proportional font while one with fixed width is a non-proportional
(or monospace or fixed-width) font.
Proportional fonts are generally considered nicer-looking and
easier to read, and thus are the most commonly used type of font
in professionally published printed material. For the same reason,
they are typically used in GUI computer applications, such as
word processors and web browsers. However, many proportional fonts
contain fixed-width figures so that columns of numbers are aligned.
Non-proportional fonts are 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, such as terminal emulators,
are configured to use only non-proportional fonts. Most computer
programmers prefer to use monospace fonts.
ASCII art requires a non-proportional font for proper viewing.
In a web page, non-proportional fonts are most commonly encountered
as a result of the <pre> </pre> HTML tag. In LaTeX,
non-proportional fonts are used by the verbatim environment.
The two lines of text in non-proportional font (should) display
as equal width, while the two lines in proportional font are radically
different widths. This is because wide characters' glyphs (WQZMDOHU)
get more screen width and narrow characters' glyphs get less when
using a proportional font.
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.
1. Blackletter typefaces
Blackletter fonts were the earliest fonts used with the invention
of the printing press. They resemble the artistic handwritings
of cloisters in the Middle Ages and fall into three groups:
a) Of all the blackletter typefaces, the Gothic ones most closely
resemble the Textura calligraphy used with manual copying of books.
A Gothic typeface was thus also carved by Johannes Gutenberg when
he printed his 42-line Bible, including a large number of ligatures
and common abbreviations. While in Germany, Gothic fonts were
quickly displaced, they remained in use in great variance and
are frequently referred to as Old English typefaces.
b) Schwabacher typefaces were predominant in Germany from about
1480 to 1530. Most importantly, all of the works of Martin Luther,
leading to the Protestant Reformation, as well as the Apocalypse
of Albrecht Dürer (1498) were printed in this typeface. It
was probably first used by Johannes Bämler, a printer from
Augsburg, in 1472. The origins of the name are unclear; some assume
that the typeface was designed by a typeface carver from the village
of Schwabach who worked externally and was thus refererred to
as the Schwabacher.
c) Most commonly known among the blackletter typefaces are those
of the Fraktur family, which started when Emperor Maximilian I
(1493-1519) established a series of books and had a new typeface
created specifically for this purpose. Fraktur faces were in wide
use in Germany until the end of World War II; see the Fraktur
article for details.
2. Serif fonts
Serif fonts are in turn divided into four major groups:
a) Renaissance, with only slight difference in thickness within
each glyph; this category includes the Garamond and Palatino typefaces.
b) Baroque, where the thickness within each glyph has greater
variety; this category includes Baskerville and Times Roman.
c) Classicist, with the most variance of thickness within each
glyph. This includes the Bodoni and Century Schoolbook typefaces.
d) Modern fonts, especially those designed primarily for decorative
purposes, frequently fall out of these categories. For example,
slab serif fonts such as Rockwell look artificial on purpose,
with almost rectangular shapes.
3. Sans-serif fonts
Sans serif designs are a relatively recent typographical phenomenon
in the history of type design. The first specimen appears to be
the two-line English so-called "Egyptian" font released
in 1816 by William Caslon's foundry, England. They are commonly,
but not exclusively, used for display typography applications
such as signage, headings and other situations where clear meaning
is imperative but continuous reading is not required.
Sans serif designs are broadly divided into 4 major groups for
the purposes of type classification:
a) Grotesques, early sans serif designs, such as Grotesque or
Royal Gothic.
b) Neo-grotesques, modern designs such as Standard, Helvetica
(Arial) and Univers.
c) Humanist (Edward Johnston's Railway type, Gill Sans or Frutiger).
d) Geometric (Futura or Spartan).
Other commonly used sans serif fonts include Lucida, Arial, Optima,
Tahoma and Verdana.
The phrase "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog",
seen in font illustrations, is an example of a pangram, i. e.,
a sentence containing every letter of the alphabet, thus displaying
every letter of each font.
Monochrome or with shades of grey
Digital bitmap fonts (and the final rendering of vector fonts)
may be monochrome or with shades of grey. The latter is for the
purpose of anti-aliasing and is not suitable for use in images
with transparent background, except when partial transparency
is applied.
Source: information here is licensed under the
GNU
Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia
article Typeface.
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