EDIT Font Today used interchangeably with «typeface», the term originally referred to a complete set of characters and symbols that were of the same style, but also the same size. The word was originally spelled «fount» and derived from the word «found» as in «typefoundry».

A Font is a collection of Glyphs.

 glossary  ke 

EDIT Glyph Graphic representation of a character. Whereas a character is just an abstract concept the glyph is its graphic manifestation. A character can have various glyphs, different in every new font. It is also possible that a character has a different glyph (shape) depending on its place within a word, as happens in some Asiatic or the Arabic script.

 glossary  tounsi 

EDIT TrueType Standard for character representation for screen and print, developed by Apple and later adopted by Microsoft. It is absed on vector graphics, therefore characters are scalable without quality loss. TrueType font file contains information such as outlines, hinting instructions, and character mappings (which characters are included in the font). Though it is the same standard for Apple and Windows platforms, fonts can\'t be used interchangeably because they are slightly different. Only the new OpenType fonts work with both systems.
TrueType files can contain up to 65,536 glyphs. Filename extension is ttf.

 glossary  de 

EDIT Widow This term describes the final line of a paragraph which, by mistake, turns out to solely start a new page or column.

 080330  080330 

EDIT Accent Diacritical mark that is added above, below or next to the basic character in order to change the way it is pronounced.

 glossary 

EDIT Acronym Pronouncable word created by using the initial letter or letters of a compound term. Usually consists of capital letters. Since acronyms as opposed to abbreviations don't have a dot at the end it is often impossible to tell that they are made-up words just by reading or hearing them (e.g. NATO).

 glossary 

EDIT Alignment Also known as justification. Refers to the position of the lines of a text. If they all start on the left, they are "flush left"(or "ragged right"); there's also "centered" and "flush left".

 glossary  :  jsw 

EDIT Alphabet Predefined set of abstract graphic elements (characters) representing phonems of a spoken language. Integrates vocals and consonants equally into a system.

 glossary  : :  de 

EDIT Alternative Glyph Alternative version of a certain glyph of a font that, though typographically different, represents the same character and can be used instead of the original glyph without altering the meaning.

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EDIT Anchor Points They define the shape of a bezier curve. Out of the nchor points come vectors that describe direction and bend of the curve. A bezier curve needs a minium of two anchor points, one defining its beginning, one the end. Vector-based design has the advantage that a graphic designed with bezier curves is scalable without losing qualitiy and that it takes a lot less data to create vectors than pixels.

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EDIT ANSI (American National Standards Institute) Standards Institute of the USA, develops and publizises standards and is independent of gremiums and the government. The ANSI represents the USA as a member of the ISO. Evolved out of ASA in 1969. Comparable to "DIN" in Germany.

 glossary 

EDIT Anti-aliasing Technique to visually smooth the edges of letters or graphics on screen. Works by rendering the pixels of the edges as "on" or "off" or a number of different greyshades in between.

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EDIT Antiqua Typefaces with serifs. They derived from two different sources: the uppercase letters developed out of the Capitalis Monumentalis, the lowercase letters from Humanist minuscule of the Italian Renaissance. The first typeface of that kind was created in the second half of the 15th century in Italy and Germany and then improved by Nicholas Jenson of Venice.

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EDIT Aperture Inner, open form of letters like C, c, S, s, a, e. The size of the aperture is a very distinctive characteristic of a typeface.

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EDIT Arabic Numerals are actually Indian numerals (1234567890). They were created by the Hindus about 400 BC but transfered to the western world by the Arabs, hence the misnomer. Today they are the internationally most common numerals. They replaced the roman numerals in Europe with the invention of printing with movable type in the 15th century and the spread of the decimal system in the 16th century.

 glossary 

EDIT Arm Horizontal or oblique stroke of a letter, connecting with the vertical line in the middle or with one end (as in: E, F, K, L, T)

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EDIT ASA (American Standard Association) Private American organisation for development of national and international standards for industry and consumers. Became ANSI in 1969.

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EDIT Ascender The part of lowercase letters that rises above the x-height and often the cap-height of the typeface. Letters: b, d, f, h, i, j, k, l, t.

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EDIT Ascender Line Imaginary line parallel to and above the capline of a typeface up to which the ascenders of lowercase letters reach.

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EDIT ASCII American Standard Code for Information Interchange. A 7-bit binary code and character set that encodes up to 128 different characters. Based on the Latin alphabet, it includes 95 printable characters with uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, punctuation marks and special characters. The unprintable characters are control characters. The ASCII was the base for the Unicode and also works platform-independent.

 glossary 

EDIT Axis Angle of the stroke of a letterform (also called stress), which basically means of the tool creating the stroke. Angled stress, especially to the left, is characteristic for oldstyle typefaces. A character can have multiple axis. Not to be confused with slope. Slope applies to the whole font, axis is a feature of an individual character.

 glossary 

EDIT Ball Terminal A circular ending of a rounded stroke of a glyph. It is seen frequently on the "c" of Antiqua fonts as well as the letters a, f, j, r, and y. Examples are Bodoni or Clarendon.
There can also be teardrops or beak terminals.

 glossary 

EDIT Baseline Imaginary line on which a charactershape rests. Some characters bend it (round letters like a, o) some rest on it (like h or i with foot serifs), some pierce it (like v or w that have pointy bottoms). Starting from the baseline, basic measurements of a font are made such as x-height or leading.

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EDIT Basic Character is a character without any added marks such as diacritics

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EDIT Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP)
The Unicode uses 16 planes for character encoding, the BMP is the first one (Plane 0). It uses 16 Bits (2 Bytes) to encode a character and encodes 65.536 characters.

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EDIT Beak Terminal The ending of a rounded stroke of a glyph that is shaped a bit like a hook or a serif. It is seen frequently on the "c" of Antiqua fonts as well as the letters a, f, j, r, and y. It's a common feature in roman typefaces of the 20th century.
There can also be ball terminals or teardrops.

 glossary  Dart 

EDIT Bicameral An Alphabet that joins two alphabets, for example an uppercase and a lowercase one. Tha Latin alphabet is an example. The opposite would be a unicameral with only one case, such as the Hebrew one.

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EDIT BiDi(rectional) means "in both directions". Scripts from different cultures vary in how they are written, they can go left-to-right (like the Latin script), right-to-left (like Hebrew or Arabic), some are even top-to-bottom. Bi-Directional means text that mixes left-to-right with right-to-left, for example when one kind quotes the other. Unicode provides BiDi-support.

 glossary 

EDIT Binary Twofold, having two as its base. A binary system can go into one of two states, for example yes/no or zero/one. Computers are binary systems.

 glossary 

EDIT Bit Abbreviation for Binary Digit. Smallest entity of electronoic data processing. A binary number can represent either 0 or 1 (on or off). Eight bits make one byte. It takes exactly one bit to define a pixel as black or white.

 glossary 

EDIT Bitmap Fileformat that uses single pixels to define the shapes of graphics or fonts

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EDIT Bitmap-Font Typeface especially for bitmap files where each character is stored as a bitmap graphic. Very difficult to scale because its just a set number of defined pixels and not curves, a sopposed to vector-based fonts.

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EDIT Blank Empty space between two words or characters.

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EDIT Body The whole of the metalblock in which a character is cast inverted. The height of the body equals the font size. The back part without the raised letterform is the shoulder.

 glossary 

EDIT Body Size Complete height of the face of a font, regardless of the size of the character itself. Comes from letterpress, it was the height of block of metal on which the character was cast.

 glossary 

EDIT Bouma Word shape. A theory about reading says that in fast reading, not single letters but the whole shape of a word, the bouma, is read, and that single characters are only read when the bouma isn't recognized immediately.

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EDIT Bounding Box The largest box that can be drawn around a graphic element (single letter, word, block of text) and just be touching it on all four sides.

 glossary 

EDIT Bowl The round part of a character that encloses the circular or round bits (counter) of letters such as d, b, o, B, C etc. Bowl, stem, ascender/descender and form/counterform are the identifying attributes of a typeface.

 glossary 

EDIT Braille Tactile writing system invented by Louis Braille in 1824. It is based on six dot matrix laid out 2x3. The system encodes characters by a combination of raised and flat dots. Braille was extended to an 8-dot system so it can represent all ASCII-characters and it is encoded in Unicode with all possible 256 combinations.

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EDIT Browser is an application used to view and access information and data in the www. The most popular browsers are currently Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator and Mozilla.

 glossary 

EDIT Byte Eight bits make one byte.

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EDIT Cap Height Height of the capital letters of a font, measured from baseline to capline of the letter H.

 glossary 

EDIT Capitalis Monumentalis (Roman Capitals) is a typeface that stems from the times of the Roman Empire. As the name says it's pure capitals, and they were mostly used to carve writings in stone. The proportions are based on a square, the characters A, O, Q and V are exact squares while all the other characters are designed in a certain ratio to the square.

 glossary 

EDIT Carolingian Minuscule New script invented by Charlemagne in the 9th century and base of the script we use to write today. It is a certain style of handwriting as well as certain writing standards such as a uniform shape of letters, writing in upper and lower case, use of punctuation and wordspaces, Before, text was just uniform lines of letters in equal height that were very hard to read.

 glossary 

EDIT Character Visual representation of a mental concept. Its a graphic sign representing the smallest entity of language that still has a semantic value. The term "character" doesn't mean a specific shape (like: has serifs or not), just the general idea of the shape of a character (e.g. an H being two vertical strokes with a connecting stroke).

 glossary 

EDIT Character Encoding Process of using a code to transfer a general representation of a character into a different representation. The codes ASCII and Unicode for example are agreements for the transfers of characters, digits, punctuation marks etc. in bitform. By sticking to an Agreed code it is possible to use texts and documents worldwide and platform independent.

 glossary 

EDIT Character Properties Every character encoded in Unicode is defined by a set of allocated characteristics. They are:
• Name
• General Category (basic partition into letters, numbers, symbols, punctuation,
and so on)
• Other important general characteristics (whitespace, dash, ideographic, alphabetic,
noncharacter, deprecated, and so on)
• Character shaping (bidi category, shaping, mirroring, width, and so on)
• Casing (upper, lower, title, folding; both simple and full)
• Numeric values and types
• Script and Block
• Normalization properties (decompositions, decomposition type, canonical
combining class, composition exclusions, and so on)
• Age (version of the standard in which the code point was first designated)
• Boundaries (grapheme cluster, word, line and sentence)
• Standardized variants

 glossary 

EDIT Character Spacing see Tracking

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EDIT Character Width The complete width a glyph takes up, including the sidebearings (without adjustments like kerning). The term stems from letterpress times where the letters were cast of lead and no kerning was possible.

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EDIT CJK Acronym for the whole of the Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages and characters.

 glossary 

EDIT Code Point Unique position and name of a character encoded in the Unicode

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EDIT Color Average greyness of a page or of a block of text. The color is part of the characteristics of a font.

 glossary 

EDIT Consonant (lat. con = with, sonare = sound) The term has two meanings, one being a sound that only exists in conjunction with another sound ( a vowel), the other one being the letter representing it. In the English language, the number of existing consonant-sound outnumbers the characters of the alphabet by far, so linguists have devised models such as the IPA that assign a unique symbol to each consonant.

 glossary 

EDIT Contrast The change in strokethickness that is characteristic for a font. The contrast differs depending on the style of writing a certain typeface derives from, more specifically which type of tool was used to write. A pointed pen changes the width of a line depending on applied pressure, a style still visible in typefaces like Bodoni. A broadnip pen is used at an angle and creates varying lines due to its shape and the slant the writer gives it, which leads to stroke with angled thickness, as visible in Garamond.

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EDIT Control Character Unprintable character out of the original ASCII-set, telling the computer to take a certain action. Some of them are space, (carriage-)return and backspace.

 glossary 

EDIT Counter The enclosed rounded part of characters like d, b, o, B that is surrounded by the bowl. Empty or negative space.

 glossary 

EDIT Counterform is the white, "negative" space around the inkfilled black shape of a letterform. It is just as important as the form itself, the contrast between form/counterform is what makes the character and legibility of a typeface.

 glossary 

EDIT Cross Bar Horizontal line in a letter. Connects to the stem or a stroke of a letter on both ends but doesn't cross them (as opposed to a cross stroke). Occurs in the letters A, H, e and others.

 glossary 

EDIT Cross Stroke Horizontal stroke across the stem of a letter, as found in a lowercase t or f.

 glossary 

EDIT Ctrl-Key Extension of the original keyboard. It allows for an alternate allocation of the keys that can be chosen by pressing the ctrl-key simultaneously with another key. Ctrl+s for a example is a common shortcut for "save document".

 glossary 

EDIT Currency Symbol Special character representing the currency of a country. Important currency symbols are Dollar, Yen, Euro, Pound

 glossary 

EDIT Cursive is not necessarily an angled typeface. Cursive says how a typeface developed, it evolved out of handwriting and can be upright as well as angled. Cursives were very popular for setting small books because they didn't take up so much room. Today, they get mostly used for emphasizing certain words or part of a text. They are more pleasing than bold type, for example, because they are different from the roman type but still go with the flow of ext, not calling too much attention to themselves. One characteristic of true cursive fonts is the shape of the lowercase a. You'll only ever find the one-storey a in a cursive font, never the double-storey one

 glossary 

EDIT Decimal System (lat. decimus "the tenth") System for the representation of values based on the factor 10. This system originates in India and is the most commonly used one worldwide.

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EDIT Diacritical Mark Additional mark placed next to (over, under, to the left or right) a character to indicate a change of tone, an accent etc.

 glossary 

EDIT Didot Point Typographic measure, created by François Ambroise Didot (1730 - 1804). One Didot point equaled 0,376006 mm. In 1978, the didot was rounded in order to better match the metric system and became 0,375 mm. 12 points are one cicero. The didot point is mainly used in Europe.

 glossary 

EDIT DIN (Deutsches Institut für Normung) German National Standards Institute. It develops technical standards for quality assurance and rationalisation in cooperation with industrie, science, consumers and the government. The DIN represents Germany in international gremiums (ISO, OEC, CEN) and is comparable to the ANSI in America. An ubiquitious example for a DIN-standard in Germany are paper sizes: DIN A4 is 210 mm x 297 mm, slightly longer than the american letter-format.

 glossary 

EDIT Dingbats Typographic symbols and ornaments

 glossary 

EDIT Diphtong (Greek δίφθογγος, "diph"- two "thongos"- sounds) Gradually changing sound created by two merged vowels. In German for example au, ei, ai; in English found for example [aʊ] as in house or [aɪ] as in kite.

 glossary 

EDIT Double Storey Glyph shape of a character that exists in a simpler shape and a more elaborate shape. There is a rounded a and a double storey a (think Futura vs. Helvetica) and a simple g and a g with a loop.

 glossary 

EDIT Dpi "Dots per inch", indicates the number of dots of ink or toner that a printer produces per inch (1 inch = 2,54 cm). It's a measure of the resolution of a printer. Generally, the higher the resolution, the better the quality of the printed image.

 glossary 

EDIT Drop Cap Large initial capital leading into a paragraph. It is larger than the rest of the letters and its size makes it drop below several lines of type of the beginning of the paragraph.

 glossary 

EDIT DTP "Desktop Publishing", using computers to create layouts for books, magazines, newspapers etc. digitally

 glossary 

EDIT Ear Small short flourish added to the right upper side of the small letter g. Can be straight or in a drop shape and can be a distinctive element of the character of a font. Also helps to guide the eye of a reader along the line of text.

 glossary 

EDIT Em-space (also em-quad, mutton) Typographic measure that is not absolute (such as point sizes are, x point = y mm) but relates to the size of the typeface. An em-space is a distance equal to the type size, which makes it a square. Since the width of the lowercase m has sometimes exactly that width it is called an em-space. Half an em is an en-space, also known as nut.

 glossary  Henk 

EDIT En-space (also nut) Half an em-space.

 glossary 

EDIT Extenders are ascenders or descenders, which means the parts of lowercase letters that are higher or lower than the x-height.

 glossary 

EDIT Eye The enclosed part of specifically the letter e, similar to the counter in other letters.

 glossary 

EDIT F-space F-space Short of Figure space. Space that equals regular figures or tab figures. All tabular figures and the f-space have identical width values.

 Henk 

EDIT Face (1) Short for typeface, set of characters designed in one style; (2) Physical surface of a cast character

 glossary 

EDIT Flexible Spaces are adjustable spaces in a text. They are necessary with abbreviations or dates, when setting hyphens or anywhere where a full wordspace would be too big

 glossary 

EDIT Font Family Group of typefaces that is designed to be used together. They share basic shapes and design principles but vary in style (like roman or italic) and weight (like light, regular, semibold, bold). Each style and weight combination is called a face, if you have a group of three or more you have a family.

 glossary 

EDIT Font Management Program Helps to organize fonts on the computer and lets the user activate, preview and classify fonts, as single fonts or in groups. Indispensable when the number of used fonts is more than just a few.

 glossary 

EDIT Foot (1) One sided serif on some characters of Antiqua-typefaces (b, d), touching the baseline; (2) Bottom margin of a page

 glossary 

EDIT Foredge Margin furthest from the spine of a book. Opposite of gutter.

 glossary 

EDIT Formatted Text Text that isn't in its raw form anymore but has been formatted in some way, for example set flush left.

 glossary 

EDIT Fournier Point The very first widespread typographic measure, introduced in 1737 by the Parisien typefounder Pierre Simon Fournier (1712-68). One point equaled 1/864 of a parisien foot (about 0,34 mm). 12 points were one cicero of 4,5 mm. The Fournier-point got very popular quite quickly and spread all over Europe. It' sdrawback was being based on a foot which tended to be a slightly different size in defferent places. It's successor was the Didot-point.

 glossary 

EDIT Fraction Number A fraction or fraction number is made up of equal part s of a whole. It is written as two numbers divided by a fraction line. The number on top or to the left is the numerator, the one on the bottom or toe the right the denominator.

 glossary 

EDIT Grotesque Term for Sans Serif fonts, used in Europe. In England sometimes shortened to "Grot". American Printers refer to them as "Gothic". "Grotesque" means strange, absurd, funny, and that's what this style appeared like to the people of the 19th century who were used to typefaces with serifs.

 glossary 

EDIT Gutter Margin closest to the spine of a book. Opposite of Foredge.

 glossary 

EDIT H/J (Also Hand j) Typesetting abbreviation for hyphenation and justification. It's the process of going through the text and adding them where needed.

 glossary 

EDIT Hairline Thinnest stroke in a typeface with very strong contrast

 glossary 

EDIT Hanging Indention Certain kind of text formatting: he first line of a paragraph is set flush left, all the following lines are indented

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EDIT Hexadecimal Sytem (Greek hexa "six", lat. decem "ten") is a system for place values with base-16. In comparison to our usual base-10 system (or the base-2 system of bits)it has the advantage of shortening long numbers (for example: base-2: 01101101 = base-16: 6D)

 glossary 

EDIT Hexadecimal Value Value in a hexadecimal system. It is represented by the numbers 0 to 9 and in addition the characters A to F (0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F).

 glossary 

EDIT Hot Type see Letterpress printing

 glossary 

EDIT HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) Markup language for the description of informations in hypertext. Defines layout, colors, pictures etc. on webpages where HTML tags are embedded in the text. Used extensively in the WWW.

 glossary 

EDIT IA-5 (International Alphabet 5) Other name for ASCII. 7-bit code, derived from a code used in telegraphing. Also known as SC11.

 glossary 

EDIT Ideographic Character Character that evolved out of a picture or symbol

 glossary 

EDIT Inch Unit of length used in the USA and Great Britain. In Germany common mainly for industrial matters such as the size of monitiors or discs. One inch is a twelfth of a foot and equals 2,54 cm

 glossary 

EDIT Indent Space at the beginning of the first line of a new paragraph. See also Hanging Indent

 glossary 

EDIT Indian Numerals are more widely known as Arabic numerals. It is a base-10 numeral system that was adopted by the arabs in the 12th/13th century and brought to the western world. We still use it today.

 glossary 

EDIT Initial First letter of a text or word that is accentuated in some way, for example by being larger, colored or even elaborately designed as a little picture.

 glossary 

EDIT IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) Phonetic character set designed to represent the sounds of all spoken languages. The last version of the standard was created by the IPA (International Phonetic Association) in 1993 and is available for free to users worldwide. The Alphabet has the code points U+0250 to U+02FF in the Unicode.

 glossary 

EDIT ISO (International Organization for Standardization) International gremium establishing worldwide technical standards. Its members are comprised of the leading organisations for unification of each country, such as the ANSI in the USA or the DIN in Germany.

 glossary 

EDIT Justified Text that is spaced to touch the margins on both sides. Can be hard to read, especially when the columns are very narrow, because words can be very wide apart. Other options are centered or flush left (ragged right)

 glossary 

EDIT Kashida A kashida is typographic effect used in Arabic writing systems. It is used for justifying lines of text and is added to characters at certain points to elongate them. See the Arabic Tatweel (U+0640) for example. It looks like a little line and can invisibly fit in between Arabic characters because the Arabic script is meant to be written fluently with connecting characters.

 jsw  jsw 

EDIT Kern part of a letter that extends into the space of the letter next to it. In handset type, part of the face of a type which extends out of the body.

 glossary 

EDIT Kerning Adjustment of space between certain characters. Due to their shape, some characters can look bad next to each other if the kerning isn't adjusted. The white space between A and V looks too big, for example. There are standard kerning pairs that are necessaryin every font, high quality fonts tend to have more kerning pairs defined.

 glossary 

EDIT Keyboard Device for data-entry into computers complete with characters, numbers, and keys with special functions. The layout of the characters depends on the script used. Also see QWERTZ, QWERTY

 glossary 

EDIT Knot is the place within a glyph where connected curves or strokes connect.

 glossary 

EDIT Language There are two concepts connected to the word language, one being "the language", the other being "language/languages". "The language" is a means of communication between humans for the exchange of thoughts, ideas and information. There is a distinction between conscious communication (speech, sign language and literary language) and unconscious communication (body language). The science of the language is called linguistics. "language/languages" in contrast means every system of signs assisting in communication, such as single human languages (e.g. English), professional languages (like legal terminology), computer languages (like Prolog, C++) etc. The sciences of certain languages are the philologies (Anglistics, German language and literature studies).

 glossary 

EDIT Last Resort Font Set of Last Resort glyphs

 glossary 

EDIT Last Resort Glyph is a glyph in the set of the Last Resort Font. When a text includes a Unicode character for which the operating system or the used program can't supply a matching glyph, it gets replaced by another symbol, often a rectangle that may be crossed out. Mac OS X uses a special character set for this purpose that uses a different glyph for each Unicode block and thus lets the user at least know to which script the missing glyph belongs.

 glossary