Each style is in a separate 'font file'—for instance, the typeface 'Bulmer' may include the fonts 'Bulmer roman', 'Bulmer italic', 'Bulmer bold' and 'Bulmer extended'—but the term 'font' might be applied either to one of these alone or to the whole typeface. In both traditional typesetting and modern usage, the word 'font' refers to the delivery mechanism of the typeface design.
In traditional typesetting, the font would be made from metal or wood. Today, the font is a digital file. In a manual printing letterpress house the word 'font' would refer to a complete set of metal type that would be used to typeset an entire page.
Upper- and lowercase letters get their names because of which case the metal type was located in for manual typesetting: the more distant upper case or the closer lower case.
The same distinction is also referred to with the terms majuscule and minuscule. Unlike a digital typeface, a metal font would not include a single definition of each character, but commonly used characters such as vowels and periods would have more physical type-pieces included. 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 point font containing 14 uppercase 'A's, and 34 lowercase 'A's.
The rest of the characters would be provided in quantities appropriate for the distribution of letters in that language. Some metal type characters 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. The reason for this spacing strip being made from 'lead' was because lead was a softer metal than the traditional forged metal type pieces which was part lead, antimony and tin and would compress more easily when 'locked-up' in the printing 'chase' i.
In the s—s, 'hot lead' typesetting was invented, in which type was cast as it was set, either piece by piece as in the Monotype technology or in entire lines of type at one time as in the Linotype technology. 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.
In European alphabetic scripts, i. Latin, Cyrillic and Greek, the main such properties are the stroke width, called weight, the style or angle and the character width. The regular or standard font is sometimes labeled roman , both to distinguish it from bold or thin and from italic or oblique.
The keyword for the default, regular case is often omitted for variants and never repeated, otherwise it would be Bulmer regular italic , Bulmer bold regular and even Bulmer regular regular.
Roman can also refer to the language coverage of a font, acting as a shorthand for 'Western European'. Different fonts of the same typeface may be used in the same work for various degrees of readability and emphasis, or in a specific design to make it be of more visual interest.
The weight of a particular font is the thickness of the character outlines relative to their height. A typeface may come in fonts of many weights, from ultra-light to extra-bold or black; four to six weights are not unusual, and a few typefaces have as many as a dozen. Many typefaces for office, web and non-professional use come with just a normal and a bold weight which are linked together.
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. The base weight differs among typefaces; 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. Deviants of these were the '6 series' italics , e. From this brief numerical system it is easier to determine exactly what a font's characteristics are, for instance 'Helvetica 67' HE67 translates to 'Helvetica Bold Condensed'.
The first algorithmic description of fonts was perhaps made by Donald Knuth in his Metafont description language and interpreter. The TrueType font format introduced a scale from through , which is also used in CSS and OpenType, where is regular roman or plain.
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. Where both appear and differ, book is often lighter than regular , but in some typefaces it is bolder. Before the arrival of computers, each weight had to be drawn manually.
As a result, many older multi-weight families such as Gill Sans and Monotype Grotesque have considerable differences in styles from light to extra-bold. Since the s, it has become increasingly common to use automation to construct a range of weights as points along a trend, multiple master or other parameterized font design. This means that many modern digital fonts such as Myriad and TheSans are offered in a large range of weights which offer a smooth and continuous transition from one weight to the next, although some digital fonts are created with extensive manual corrections.
As digital font design allows more variants to be created faster, an increasingly common development in professional font design is the use of 'grades': slightly different weights intended for different types of paper and ink, or printing in a different region with different ambient temperature and humidity. Grades are typically offered with characters having the same width on all grades, so that a change of printing materials does not affect copyfit. In European typefaces, especially Roman ones, a slope or slanted style is used to emphasise important words.
This is called italic type or oblique type. These designs normally slant to the right in left-to-right scripts.
Oblique styles are often called italic, but differ from 'true italic' styles. Italic styles are more flowing than the normal typeface, approaching a more handwritten, cursive style, possibly using ligatures more commonly or gaining swashes.
Although rarely encountered, a typographic face may be accompanied by a matching calligraphic face cursive , script , giving an exaggeratedly italic style.
In many sans-serif and some serif typefaces, especially in those with strokes of even thickness the characters of the italic fonts are only slanted , which is often done algorithmically, without otherwise changing their appearance. Such oblique fonts are not true italics, because lower-case letter-shapes do not change, but are often marketed as such.
Fonts normally do not include both oblique and italic styles: the designer chooses to supply one or the other. Since italic styles clearly look different to regular roman styles, it is possible to have 'upright italic' designs that take a more cursive form but remain upright; Computer Modern is an example of a font that offers this style.
In Latin-script countries, upright italics are rare but are sometimes used in mathematics or in complex documents where a section of text already in italics needs a 'double italic' style to add emphasis to it.
In Frutiger's nomenclature the second digit for upright fonts is a 5, for italic fonts a 6 and for condensed italic fonts an 8. The two Japanese syllabaries, katakana and hiragana, are sometimes seen as two styles or typographic variants of each other, but usually are considered separate character sets as a few of the characters have separate kanji origins and the scripts are used for different purposes. The gothic style of the roman script with broken letter forms, on the other hand, is usually considered a mere typographic variant.
Cursive-only scripts such as Arabic also have different styles, in this case for example Naskh and Kufic, although these often depend on application, area or era. There are other aspects that can differ among font styles, but more often these are considered immanent features of the typeface. These include the look of digits text figures and the minuscules, which may be smaller versions of the capital letters small caps although the script has developed characteristic shapes for them.
Some typefaces do not include separate glyphs for the cases at all, thereby abolishing the bicamerality. While most of these use uppercase characters only, some labeled unicase exist which choose either the majuscule or the minuscule glyph at a common height for both characters.
Some typefaces include fonts that vary the width of the characters stretch , although this feature is usually rarer than weight or stroke. Narrower fonts are usually labeled compressed , condensed or narrow. In Frutiger's system, the second digit of condensed fonts is a 7. Wider fonts may be called wide , extended or expanded. Both can be further classified by prepending extra , ultra or the like. Compressing a font design to a condensed weight is a complex task, requiring the strokes to be slimmed down proportionally and often making the capitals straight-sided.
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