Although rarely encountered, a typographic face may be accompanied by a matching calligraphic face, which might be considered a further font style of one typeface. In this italic type, character edges may even connect, and ligatures are more common. When the normal, Roman or upright font is slanted – usually to the right in left-to-right scripts – the lowercase character shapes change slightly as well, approaching a more handwritten, cursive style. In today's European typefaces, especially Roman ones, the font style is usually connected to the angle. Whether "book" is lighter or heavier than regular is not entirely consistent across typefaces, though "lighter" seems to be more common. The terms normal, regular and plain, sometimes also book, are being used for the standard weight font of a typeface. However, the relative order is generally uniform and is something like the following: The method of describing font weight differs between type foundries and designers. The first algorithmic description of fonts was perhaps made by Donald Knuth in his Metafont and TeX system of programs. ![]() The TrueType font format introduced a scale from 100 through 900, also used in CSS and OpenType. Therefore weight designations in font names may differ in regard to the actual absolute stroke weight or density of glyphs in the font.Īttempts to systematize a range of weights led to a numerical classification first used by Adrian Frutiger with the Univers typeface, although therein only ranging from 3 to 8. For example, fonts intended to be used on posters are often quite bold by default, while fonts for long runs of text are rather light. The base weight differs among typefaces that means one normal font may appear bolder than some other normal font. If no bold weight is provided, many renderers (browsers, word processors, graphic and DTP programs) can "fake" a bold font by rendering the outline a second time at an offset or smearing it slightly at a diagonal angle. Many typefaces for office, web, and non-professional use come with a normal and bold weight. It is common for a typeface to have four to six weights, and a few typefaces have as many as a dozen. A typeface may come in fonts of many weights, from ultra-light to extra-bold or black. Applying bold to a font makes the font wider relative to the height. The weight of a particular font is the thickness of the character outlines relative to their height. Otherwise, it would be Bulmer regular italic, Bulmer bold regular, and even Bulmer regular regular.ĭifferent fonts of the same face may be used in the same work for various degrees and types of emphasis. The keyword for the default, regular case is often omitted for variants and never repeated. The regular, or standard font, is often labeled roman, both to distinguish it from bold or thin and from italic or oblique. Latin, Cyrillic and Greek, the main properties are stroke width(weight), and the style or angle. In the late 1800s, "hot lead" typesetting was invented, in which type was cast as it was set, either piece by piece (as in the Monotype technology or entire lines of type at a time (as in the Linotype technology).īesides the character height, there are several characteristics which may help identify distinct fonts based on the script(s) that the typeface supports. Line spacing was called "leading", because the lead strips used were made of lead. Some metal type required in typesetting, such as dashes and line-width spacers, were not part of a specific font in pre-digital usage but were separate, generic pieces. The rest of the characters would be provided in quantities appropriate for the distribution of letters in that language. A font would often be sold as 12pt 14A 34a, meaning that it would be a size 12 point font containing 14 uppercase 'A's, and 34 lowercase 'A's. Commonly used characters (such as vowels and periods) have more physical type-pieces included. Unlike a digital typeface, it does not include a single definition of each character. ![]() In traditional manual printing (letterpress), the font is a complete set of metal type that is used to typeset an entire page.
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