A typeface is a design of letters, numbers and other symbols, to be used in printing or for electronic display. Most typefaces include variations in size (e.g., 24 point), weight (e.g., light, bold), slope (e.g., italic), width (e.g., condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font.
There are thousands of different typefaces in existence, with new ones being developed constantly.
The profession of designing typefaces is called type design. Designers of typefaces are called type designers and are often employed by type foundries. In desktop publishing, type designers are sometimes also called "font developers" or "font designers." A typographer is someone who uses typefaces to design a page layout.
Every typeface is a collection of glyphs, each of which represents a grapheme an individual letter, number, punctuation mark, or other symbol. There are typefaces tailored for special applications, such as cartography, astrology or mathematics.
Terminology
In professional typography, the term typeface is not interchangeable with the word font. The term font has historically been defined as a given set of character shapes in a single size. For example, 8-point Caslon Italic was one font, and 10-point Caslon Italic was another. Historically, a font came from a type foundry as a set of "sorts", with a number of copies of each character included.
As the range of typeface designs increased and requirements of publishers broadened over the centuries, fonts of specific weight (blackness or lightness) and stylistic variants—most commonly regular or roman as distinct from italic, as well as condensed—have led to font families, collections of closely related typeface designs that can include hundreds of styles. A typeface family is typically a group of related typefaces which vary only in weight, orientation, width, etc., but not design. For example, Times is a typeface family, whereas Times Roman, Times Italic and Times Bold are individual typefaces making up the Times family. Typeface families typically include several typefaces, though some, such as Helvetica, may consist of dozens of fonts. In traditional typography, a font family is a set of fonts within the same typeface: for example Times Roman 8, Times Roman 10, Times Roman 12, etc. In web typography, the term "font family", as specified using the HTML code , may equate to a "typeface family" or to a very broad category such as sans-serif that encompass many typeface families.
Another way to look at the distinction between a computer font and a typeface is that a computer font is the vessel—e.g. the software—that provides a set of characters with a given appearance, whereas a typeface is the actual design of such characters. Therefore, a given typeface, such as Times, may be rendered by different fonts, such as digital font files created by this or that vendor, a set of metal type characters etc. In the metal type era, a font also meant a specific point size, but with digital scalable outline fonts this distinction is no longer used, as a single font may be scaled to any size.
The first "extended" font families, which included a wide range of widths and weights in the same general style emerged in the early 1900s, starting with ATF's Cheltenham (1902–1913), with an initial design by Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, and many additional faces designed by Morris Fuller Benton.McGrew, Mac. American Metal Typefaces of the Twentieth Century (second edition). New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Books, 1993: 85–87. . Later examples include Futura, Lucida, ITC Officina. Some became superfamilies as a result of revival, such as Linotype Syntax, Linotype Univers; while others have alternate styling designed as compatible replacements of each other, such as Compatil, Generis
Font superfamilies began to emerge when foundries began to include typefaces with significant structural differences, but some design relationship, under the same general family name. Arguably the first superfamily was created when Morris Fuller Benton created Clearface Gothic for ATF in 1910, a sans-serif companion to the existing (serifed) Clearface. From a typographer's perspective, the "superfamily" designation does not include sets of unrelated typefaces marketed with the same or similar family names. For example, the foundries that market Caslon Antique and Futura Black and Display named them in association with the Caslon and Futura families despite being structurally unrelated to those families. Consequently, typographers do not consider Caslon Antique and Futura Black/Display to be valid members of any Caslon or Futura 'superfamily'.
Additional or supplemental glyphs intended to match a main typeface have been in use for centuries. In some formats they have been marketed as separate fonts. In the early 1990s, the Adobe Systems type group introduced the idea of expert set fonts, which had a standardized set of additional glyphs, including small caps, old style figures, and additional superior letters, fractions and ligatures not found in the main fonts for the typeface. Supplemental fonts have also included alternate letters such as swashes, dingbats, and alternate character sets, complementing the regular fonts under the same family. However, with introduction of font formats such as OpenType, those supplemental glyphs were merged into the main fonts, relying on specific software capabilities to access the alternate glyphs.
Since Apple's and Microsoft's operating systems supported different character sets in the platform related fonts, some foundries used expert fonts in a different way. These fonts included the characters which were missing on either Macintosh or Windows computers, e.g. fractions, ligatures or some accented glyphs. The goal was to deliver the whole character set to the customer regardless of which operating system was used.
Anatomy
Typographers have developed a comprehensive vocabulary for describing the many parts and attributes of typefaces, fonts, and glyphs. Some only apply to certain writing systems: here, "LGC" refers to Latin script, Greek script, and Cyrillic script; and "CJK" refers to Chinese script, Japanese script, and Korean script.
A stroke is a line or curve that is part of an LGC letter; CJK strokes can include compound shapes written in a single movement of a brush. The stroke ending for LGC letters can have serifs or a variety of sans serif (without serif) terminals Characters in a typeface can be variable-width (proportional) or fixed-width (monospaced). Chinese and Japanese characters are often displayed on a grid (with reading lines either left-to-right or top-to-bottom). Characters like Latin letters and Arabic numerals and kana have halfwidth and fullwidth forms which can fit this grid. A font with a mix of only halfwidth and fullwidth characters is a duospaced font. In LGC fonts, from the baseline (bottom of most letters) is measured the descender height (e.g. the bottom of "p"), the x-height (top of "x"), the cap height (top of a capital letter like "S"), and ascender height (height above the top of a lowercase "x", potentially higher than cap height). LGC typefaces typically have Arabic digits the same height as capital letters. In a typeface with text figures, Arabic digits blend in with lowercase letters more, as some are x-height and some have descenders or ascenders. Some proportional fonts have fixed-width Arabic digits, known as tabular figures.
Sizing The size of typefaces and fonts is traditionally measured in points;Graham, Lisa. Basics of Design: Layout & Typography for Beginners. New York: Delmar, 2002: 184. . point has been defined differently at different times, but now the most popular is the Desktop Publishing point of in (). When specified in typographic sizes, such as points or kyus, the height of an em-square, an invisible box which is typically a bit larger than the distance from the tallest ascender to the lowest descender, is scaled to equal the specified size.Apple's TrueType Reference Manual Retrieved on 2009-06-21 For example, when setting Helvetica at 12 point, the em square defined in the Helvetica font is scaled to 12 points or . Yet no particular element of 12-point Helvetica need measure exactly 12 points.
Frequently measurement in non-typographic units—feet, inches, meters—is of the cap-height, the height of the capital letters. Font size is also commonly measured in millimeters (mm) and qs—which is a quarter of a millimeter, kyu in romanized Japanese—and inches.
Simply scaling a shape to be larger or smaller does not necessarily produce an aesthetically pleasing result. The intended physical viewing size of a font is called its optical size.
History
The technology of printing text using movable type was invented in China, but the vast number of Chinese characters, and the esteem in which calligraphy was held, meant that few distinctive, complete typefaces were created in China in the early centuries of printing.
Gutenberg's most important innovation in the mid-15th-century development of his press was not printing itself, but the casting of Latinate types. Unlike Chinese characters, which are based on a uniform square area, European Latin characters vary in width, from the very wide "M" to the slender "l". Gutenberg developed an adjustable mold which could accommodate an infinite variety of widths. From then until at least 400 years later, type started with cutting punches, which would be struck into a brass "matrix". The matrix was inserted into the bottom of the adjustable mold and the negative space formed by the mold cavity plus the matrix acted as the master for each letter that was cast. The casting material was an alloy usually containing lead, which has a low melting point, cools readily, and can easily be filed and finished. In those early days, type design had to not only imitate the handwritten forms familiar to readers, but also account for the limitations of the printing process, such as rough papers of uneven thickness, the squeezing or splashing properties of the ink, and the eventual wear on the type itself.
Type foundries have cast fonts in lead alloys from the 1450s until the present, although wood served as the material for some large fonts called wood type during the 19th century, particularly in the United States.
Beginning in the 1890s, each character was drawn in a very large size for the American Type Founders Corporation and a few others using their technology—over a foot (30 cm) high. The outline was then traced by a Benton pantograph-based engraving machine with a pointer at the hand-held vertex and a cutting tool at the opposite vertex down to a size usually less than a quarter-inch (6 mm). The pantographic engraver was first used to cut punches, and later to directly create matrices. This mechanization of typesetting allowed automated casting of fonts on the fly as lines of type in the size and length needed. This was known as continuous casting, and remained profitable and widespread until its demise in the 1970s. The first machine of this type was the Linotype machine, invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler.