Fonts & Typesetting
The advent of desktop publishing
has provided graphic artists
with a seemingly endless
collection of digital fonts
to work with. Designers can
also manipulate these fonts
to create additional typographic
forms. They can be layered,
extended, overlapped or condensed,
just to name a few. Although
this is a dream for designers,
these advanced typographic
fonts can make it difficult
to comprehend or even read
the content of a printed
document.
The word font originated
from the word foundry, relating
to the location that type
was cast, and has since evolved
to mean that which represents
the characters in a font.
Fonts or typefaces are collections
of characters. Characters
are the smallest forms of
the written language, in
other words, separate letterforms.
Whereas a character represents
the printed image, a glyph
represents the shape of each
character.
Fonts are measured in points.
Designers can manipulate
point spacing using either
kerning or leading, or both.
Kerning adjusts the spacing
between the letterforms and
leading adjusts the spacing
between the lines. This allows
a designer or printer to
manipulate spacing or create
different effects without
changing the font. In addition
to spacing, there are three
main typesetting styles used
when printing -- justified
left, justified right and
centered.
Wrapping the text around
a visual is another typesetting
option. Typestyles include
two main categories: serif
and san serif. Serif fonts
have small hats on the letter
edges and san serif fonts
do not. For example, serif
fonts include Garamond, Times
New Roman, Palatino, Lucida
Bright, and Courier. San
serif fonts include Arial,
Chicago, Geneva, and Monaco.
In addition, both serif and
san serif fonts can either
use bold or italic styles.
In conclusion, a font is
a complete set of letters,
numbers and punctuation marks.
Size, spacing, and alignment
provide additional arrangements
for the font in a printed
document.
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