Typeface

As is known in typography font graphic design of a character set.

Term

The concept of font helps to differentiate different glyph sets with consistent design concept in itself, not only by their name suggests, such as Helvetica, Univers, Frutiger or, but also by their typographic characterization in detail. This is the general term of font (English typeface ).

A similar concept is that of font family, which is the sum of the cuts of a font. Thus, the specific sections of a font can about such as "bold ", " italic " or " narrow".

With the conceptual apparatus of typography fonts are characterized going on and classified (see font classification and subsequent main section "Font shape ").

In addition to the properties of the fonts it is necessary to refer to the technical aspect of the character set generation:

The technical implementation of a type design (English font- making ), formerly the casting of the letters was one of its practical use for the in lead and today, and by the software -based generation of electronic character in the form of fonts for display on computer screens is replaced printers, has rückkoppelnde effects on the graphic design of character sets. Thus gradually crystallizes in addition to the traditional paper typography Digital typography, a new out that addresses the needs of digital texts. Fonts are thus designed, increasingly, on the basis of criteria of digital typography. There are now a variety of fonts that are designed for example for low-resolution computer screens. In just such a sense, a Webtypographie that makes the typographic needs of texts for the World Wide Web to the task developed. So then also create new fonts for the Web. In short, more fonts are developed, thus satisfying the purely technical information needs.

Use of fonts

The criteria for using a particular font can be:

• Availability: The Windows fonts such as Arial, for example, the very reason widely used because they are available on any Windows system and appropriately formatted documents can be replaced easily among multiple users.
• Emotional effect: A text can fulfill different purposes. According to his task he is set in a matching font. In the transport sector are mainly grotesque, like Univers, application, in belletristic literature is often resorted to as the Renaissance Antiqua Garamond, and a more playful font is Comic Sans MS, which is also used as "child - font ".
• Readability: It is important to be able to read a book to relaxing, or more distant street signs to decipher. The eye of the reader must be as light as possible, the individual letters of a text from one another and can recognize. Impact on the readability of a font has recommended in addition to the design of the word and character spaces and the shape of the character itself Thus, for longer printed on paper texts ( paragraph text ) roman typefaces. The greater complexity of the characters is just not, as is often assumed, lesehindernd but also enhances their distinctness. When it comes to readability, not simplicity, but for uniqueness of the characters.

Font shape

Serif

Serifs are small finishing strokes of a letter, known colloquially as "feet ".

They form a horizontal line, on which the eye of the reader can orientate. Therefore, serif fonts are suitable, in particular the Antiqua, particularly for printed body text (books, articles ). For posters, billboards, signs, etc. however, it does important to decipher even at greater distances separate words. Fonts are used without serifs here because of its greater clarity.

One of the fundamental characteristics of a font are nonexistent or missing serifs. Writing classes with serifs are slab serif Antiqua and, font without serifs is called a grotesque ( sans-serif font ).

Also for the representation of continuous text are sans-serif fonts may be better suited: Today's computer monitors have compared to a printing machine an extremely low image resolution, so that serifs are not perceived more clearly as belonging to the letter and then, especially at smaller sizes, the flow of reading rather hinder than help.

Height

Besides the fact that there are two parallel alphabets of upper and lower case letters, his letters differ even in other points. For example, considering the height of the individual letters. First of all is the fact that they share the same line. The baseline is the bottom of the line itself, which is indicated by their feet serif text. On this base line "stand" all the letters and go different distances above or below this addition.

The height of a character is described with horizontal boundary lines:

• Cap height, the height of a capital letter ( initial cap ): A, B, C, D, E, ... Z
• X-height ( x-height ), the height of most lowercase letters: a, c, e, m, n, o, r, s, u, v, w, x, z
• Top length, it slightly protrudes out of the x-height: b, d, h, k, l
• With length, it projects below the base line addition: g, j, p, q, Y
• Exceptions: J, Q, f, i, t. The size of these letters varies from font to font, so here also depends on what font to use for display or printing.

The x-height is of particular importance when considering the font size. The "x" is a randomly chosen example letter, the hand of distinction that its ends nestle ( in most fonts ) to the two (imaginary) horizontal lines of the base line and the x-height. The x - height, ie a horizontal boundary line, which have many small letters together, has a big impact on the typeface, which plays a major role in the typesetting.

Tracking

The tracking of a font describes how large is the horizontal dimension of a written text. It is caused by the width of each letter as well as the distance that they have each other. The tracking plays for typesetting in books, newspapers, magazines, etc. a major role, since it determines how a font is " economically ", that is, how economical it deals with space. To save valuable space, it 's just for this purpose -designed narrow - sections of a font (English "condensed "). Much less common extra-wide averages are used (English " extended" ), most of this are grotesque ( sans serifs ). The use of broad sections is less economical than graphically ( for headlines, posters, logos, corporate design, etc.).

Proportions

Normally, the individual characters in a font have different widths, a "w" So takes up more space than an "i". Such fonts are called proportional. Common members of this group are, for example, Times, Arial or Lucida. To simplify the design of typewriters and computers, not proportional called monospace font were used, in which all the characters have an identical width. The most famous of these writings is the Courier and Lucida Console font Lucida Sans, however, is proportional. Even in the earlier standard computer terminals such writings were used and how to find non- proportional fonts in many cases in the field of computer use. For example, the machine- readable portion of the payment forms will be printed with OCR-B font. With ASCII art even an art movement has developed that would probably never have come into being without the wide dissemination of non - proportional fonts.

Assessment of fonts

Although pangrams not contain all characters in a font, they are often used to provide a rough assessment of fonts. The known pangrams contain almost all small letters, some big letters, no numbers and a few punctuation marks. Some typical pangrams are as follows:

• Quick brown fox completely dilapidated taxi across Bavaria. ( without umlauts and 'ß' )
• "Fix, Schwyz! " Squawks Jürgen stupid from the pass.
• Wrong practicing of xylophone music tortures every larger dwarf.
• Duc, Zephyrs exsurgens, durum cum flatibus Aequor. (without JKW, as these are uncommon in Latin )