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This article is about the traditional meaning of "font". For the electronic data file, see Computer font. For other uses, see Font (disambiguation).






Metal type[edit]

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. Unlike a digital typeface it 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 12-point font containing 14 uppercase 'A's, and 34 lowercase 'A's. Given the name upper and lowercase because of which case the metal type was located in, otherwise known as majuscule and minuscule. 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.[2] Line spacing is still often called "leading", because the strips used for line spacing were made of lead (rather than the harder alloy used for other pieces). 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.e. a carrier for holding all the type together).


Font characteristics[edit]






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. 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.


The TrueType font format introduced a scale from 100 through 900, where 400 is regular (roman or plain), which is also used in CSS and OpenType. The first algorithmic description of fonts was perhaps made by Donald Knuth in his Metafont and TeX system of programs.


  • Hairline
  • Thin
  • Ultra-light
  • Extra-light
  • Light
  • Book
  • Normal / regular / roman / plain
  • Medium
  • Demi-bold / semi-bold
  • Bold
  • Extra-bold / extra
  • Heavy
  • Black
  • Extra-black
  • Ultra-black / ultra



In contemporary European typefaces, especially roman ones, the font style is usually connected to the angle. 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 this italic type, character edges may even connect and ligatures are more common. In many typefaces uppercase letters are merely slanted in italic fonts, but in some they change their appearance, too, e.g. by gaining swashes. Although rarely encountered, a typographic face may be accompanied by a matching calligraphic face (cursive, script), which might be considered a further font style of one typeface.

Cyrillic italics

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 they lack the change in letter shapes which is part of the definition of an italic.

On the other hand, there are typefaces with upright characters that take a more cursive form without a change in angle. For example the Cyrillic minuscule ‘т’ may look like a smaller form of its majuscule ‘Т’ or more like a roman small ‘m’ as in its standard italic appearance; in this case the distinction between styles is also a matter of local preference.


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. The gothic style of the roman script with broken letter forms, on the other hand, is usually considered a mere typographic variant.




Some typefaces include fonts that vary the width of the characters (stretch).

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.




Optical size[edit]


Some professional digital typefaces include fonts that are optimised for certain sizes, for instance by using a thinner stroke weight if they are intended to be printed larger, or by using ink traps if they are to be printed at small size on poor-quality paper. This was common in the metal type period for most typefaces, since each size would be custom-cut, but declined as the pantograph, phototypesetting and digital fonts made printing the same font at any size simpler.

There are several naming schemes for such variant designs. One such scheme, invented and popularized by Adobe Systems, refers to the variant fonts by the applications those are typically used for, with the exact point sizes intended varying slightly by typeface:

extremely large sizes, usually larger than 72 point
large sizes, typically 19–72 point
large text, typically about 14–18 point
usually left unnamed, typically about 10–13 point
Small Text (SmText)
typically about 8–10 point
very small, typically about 6–8 point


Font metrics refers to metadata consisting of numeric values relating to size and space in the font overall, or in its individual glyphs. Font-wide metrics include cap height, x-height, ascender height, descender depth, and the font bounding box. Glyph-level metrics include the glyph bounding box, the advance width (the proper distance between the glyph's initial pen position and the next glyph's initial pen position), and sidebearings (space that pads the glyph outline on either side).


Serifs within the Thesis typeface family
Italic capital swashes





See also[edit]


  2. ^ "Basic Letterpress Tools". Retrieved 2008-12-07. 

