Digital Typography

Glossary of Terms

Typography

The study, design and usage of fonts and typefaces. At one point, before digital type, a typographer was a specialist in the field of designing and setting type. With the advent of the digital age of desktop publishing there are few, outside of typeface designers, who call themselves typographers. Indeed, every graphic designer should be able to call themselves a typographer to some degree.

Ascender

A typographic term for the portion of lowercase characters that rises above the main body of the letter. The lowercase letters b, d, f, h, k, l and t have ascenders.

Baseline

The baseline is the imaginary rule where lines of text sit.

Character Space

A character space is a value for spacing between characters set by the font designer.

Counter

The white space enclosed by a letterform, whether wholly enclosed (as in "d" or "o") or partially (as in "c" or "m").

Descender

That portion of a letter that falls below the baseline, as in 'j', 'g', 'q', 'p' and 'y'.

Display Type

Display fonts are those that are designed to be used for on-screen use, rather than for printed reproduction. Fonts such as Verdana and Trebuchet, for example, were specifically designed for use on web sites as they are extremely readable on computer screens.

Em Dash

A long 'hyphen' (although it can also refer to a measurement of space) traditionally being the length of an uppercase letter 'M'. Under desktop publishing, the length can vary from this and is generally the same measurement as the size of the line of type.
Inpage layout packages it is possible to specify, in the preferences, whether to use the traditional typesetters Em size or the digital PostScript measurement.
An Em dash measures 1/6th of 1".

En Dash

Unit of measurement (usually applied to a 'hyphen' style dash) that is half the width of an Em. An En dash measures 1/12th of 1".

Hanging Punctuation

Hanging punctuation "hangs" the quote mark outside the text edge.


Hyphen

A hyphen ( - ) is a punctuation mark. It is used both to join words and to separate syllables. It is often confused with a dash ( –, —, ― ), which is longer. Hyphenation is the use of hyphens.


Justified type

Justified type is when a paragraph of text is set to the full width of the line length, so that it aligns flush on both sides.

Kerning

Kerning is to reduce space between a pair of letters for better visual spacing.

Leading

Leading is the term applied to the spacing between lines of text. It is called leading due to the fact that, in the days of hot-metal typesetting, strips of lead were used to enlarge the space between lines of type.

Ligatures

Two or more characters combined to form a single character or glyph, for example the lower-case 'f' and 'l'. Ligatures are used to combine certain letters so as to avoid an ugly clash between elements of each character. Ligatures are rarely used for headlines.

Line Spacing

The vertical distance between two lines of type, measured from base line to base line. For example, 10/12 indicates 10-point type with 12 points base to base (that is, with 2 points of leading).

Non-breaking Space

A space character which is treated as a letter for word-break purposes. In HTML a non-breaking space is a white-space character that will not condense. It is usually used to hold open table cells and add spacing between words.

Paragraph Formatting

Paragraph formatting is a method of setting up styles in small or large docments to ensure consistency in appearance



Pica

Unit of measurement equivalent to 4,216 mm. There are 6 Picas to 1" (25.4 mm).

Point System

A Point is the smallest of the typographical measuring units. 1 point equals 0,351 mm. There are 12 points in a Pica and 72 ponts to 1". The Point system is the most common form of measurement for setting type. Font sizes and line spaces (leading) are nearly always specified in points. The size of a font is measures from the top of the ascender to the bottom of the descender.

Serif

A serif font is a typeface that has an extra stroke at the end of the vertical and horizontal strokes of the main letter-form. A font that doesn't have this extra stroke is known as sans-serif.

Examples of serif typefaces include Times, Garamond, Goudy and Palatino. It used to be a commonly accepted wisdom that serif fonts were more readable than sans-serf for large blocks of printed body copy. This theory has been questioned in recent times - but the argument still rages amongst designers.

Sans-serif

Type-styles that lacks the serif stroke at the end of the horizontal or vertical strokes of the main letter-form.


Smart Quotes

Quotation marks, also called quotes or inverted commas, are punctuation marks used in pairs to set off speech, a quotation, or a phrase. The pair consists of an opening quotation mark and a closing quotation mark, which may or may not be the same character.


Tracking

Tracking is similar to Kerning, in that it affects the spacing between letters. But, rather then reducing the space between two letter-faces individually, tracking affects a whole word, or sentence, depending on how much text is selected to track.

Tracking is often used by typesetters and DTP operators to get a line of text to fit. By compressing the space between the letters in a word or line of text, a line that is too long to fit in a column of text can be brought back to fit. This is known as 'negative tracking'.

Positive tracking letters is generally frowned upon by typesetters. This stems partially from a misquote attributed to the typographer Frederic Goudy. Upon receiving an award, printed in his famous Blackletter typeface, Goudy is said to have sneered that;'anyone who would letterspace blackletter would steal sheep'. This has since been mistranslated as; 'anyone who would letterspace lowercase would steal sheep".

Whether it is indeed wrong to positively track letters, or not and under what circumstances, is a debate that still rages amongst designers.

Type Alignment

In typesetting and page layout, alignment or range, is the setting of text flow or image placement relative to a page, column (measure), table cell or tab. The type alignment setting is sometimes referred to as text alignment, text justification or type justification.

Wordspace

The space between words, which may be expanded for purposes of justification.

X-Height

In typographical terminology, the x-height of a font is the distance between the baseline of a line of type and the top of the main part of the lower-case letter-faces - apart from the ascenders and descenders. The letter 'x' is obviously used as prime example.


Reference:
http://www.designtalkboard.com/glossary/fonts/n-glossary.php
http://www.redsun.com/type/glossary/c.shtml
http://home.vicnet.net.au/~typo/glossary/alpha-4.htm
http://www.google.com.au/search
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typographic_alignment
http://desktoppub.about.com/od/typelayout/ss/hangingquotes.h