About Fonts

A font is a design for a complete set of type characters in a particular style and size. That’s the quick and easy definition, but to understand how fonts fit in to the worlds of typography and computers, you have to know a couple of other terms.

The word font is very often incorrectly used as a synonym for typeface. Here’s the difference: A typeface is a distinctive, visually consistent design for the symbols in an alphabet, and a font is how a typeface appears when it includes specific characteristics such as size, weight, spacing, and so on. For example, Times-Roman Bold Oblique is a typeface, and Times-Roman 12 Bold Oblique is a font. Times-Roman is an example of a family, a set of fonts of the same typeface, but in different sizes and variations of style such as plain, bold, italic, oblique, bold italic, demibold, and so on.

In the predigital era, fascinatingly, each character was cast in its own block of metal, and these blocks were arranged in a row in the correct order to make words when inked and pressed into paper. In this world of metal type, a font is the alphabet and its accessory characters, cast into the blocks in a given typeface and size. In this sense, a printer could carry a box full of a font, or physically load a font into a typesetting machine. (And this also explains why companies that design fonts are still called foundries.)

Similarly, in our computer era, font has come to mean not only the typeface and its character set, but also the digital information encoding it. The files that contain this information are commonly referred to as fonts. In this sense, you could ask someone to copy fonts from a CD to a folder on a hard drive.

The word font has also come to be used in place of typeface and family, much to the bewilderment of typography purists. This is because today a single computer file can contain all the typefaces in a font family, and create them in any size desired.

So, in general usage today, font has come to mean a digital file that contains the information necessary for a computer to create characters of a unique, unified design on the screen and in print.

A character is an abstract visual symbol for a letter, number, punctuation mark, or mathematical sign. But in computer-speak, a character is any symbol that requires one byte of storage, as well as its representation within the computer in a numerical code system such as ASCII or Unicode (more about this later). Even an empty space between words is a character in these systems, the character that is sent when you press the space bar on your keyboard.

The height of characters in a font is measured in points, with each point measuring about 1/72 inch. Selecting a point size in a program changes the displayed size of the font.

A glyph is the actual shape of a character’s image; it represents the character visually and graphically. The first letter of the English alphabet is the character A, but the A can be drawn as a capital or a lowercase, a plain or an italic, in one typeface or another; and they would all be different glyphs. Some fonts have alternate glyphs for the same character, to be used in different circumstances, for instance to provide a choice between a fancier or plainer letter A.