22-09-2012, 10:53 AM
FONTS
my seminar fonts.doc (Size: 247 KB / Downloads: 30)
Fonts
In typography, a font is traditionally defined as a quantity of sorts composing a complete character set of a single size and style of a particular typeface. For example, the complete set of all the characters for "9-point Bulmer" is called a font, and the "10-point Bulmer" would be another separate font, but part of the same font family, whereas "9-point Bulmer boldface" would be another font in a different font family of the same typeface. One individual font character might be referred to as a "sort," "piece of font," or "piece of type".
Font nowadays is frequently used synonymously with the term typeface, although they had clearly understood different meanings before the advent of digital typography and desktop publishing.
Beginning in the 1980s, with the introduction of computer fonts, a broader definition for the term "font" evolved. Different sizes of a single style—separate fonts in metal type—are now generated from a single computer font, because vector shapes can be scaled freely. "Bulmer", the typeface, may include the fonts "Bulmer roman", "Bulmer italic", "Bulmer bold" and "Bulmer extended", but there is no separate font for "9-point Bulmer italic" as opposed to "10-point Bulmer italic"
Etymology
The term font, a doublet of the word fondue, derives from Middle French fonte, meaning "(something that has been) melt(ed)", referring to type produced by casting molten metal at a type foundry. English-speaking printers have used the term fount for centuries to refer to the multi-part metal type used to assemble and print in a particular size and typeface.
Metal type
In a traditional manual printing (letterpress) house the word font would refer to a complete set of metal type that would be used totypeset 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. 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).
In the 1880s–90s, "hot lead" typesetting was invented, in which type was cast as it was set, either piece by piece (as in the Monotypetechnology) or in entire lines of type at one time (as in the Linotype technology).
Weight
The weight of a particular font is the thickness of the character outlines relative to their height.
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.
What is a Computer Font
A computer font (or font) is an electronic data file containing a set of glyphs, characters, or symbols such as dingbats. Although the term font first referred to a set of metal type sorts in one style and size, since the 1990s it is generally used to refer to a scalable set of digital shapes that may be printed at many different sizes.
There are three basic kinds of computer font file data formats:
• Raster fonts consist of a matrix (or bitmap) of dots or pixels representing the image of each glyph in each face and size.
• Outline fonts (also called vector fonts) use Bézier curves, drawing instructions and mathematical formulae to describe each glyph, which make the character outlines scalable to any size.
• Stroke fonts use a series of specified lines and additional information to define the profile, or size and shape of the line in a specific face, which together describe the appearance of the glyph.
Raster fonts are faster and easier to use in computer code, but non-scalable, requiring a separate font for each size. Outline and stroke fonts can be resized using a single font and substituting different measurements for components of each glyph, but are somewhat more complicated to render on screen than raster fonts, as they require additional computer code to render the outline to a bitmap for display on screen or in print. Although all types are still in use, most fonts seen and used on computers are outline fonts.