| Type Faces |
| Type Terms A type face may be named for its original designer (Baskerville, Bodoni, Garamond, Goudy); for its use (Times Roman was designed for the London Times; Century and Avant Garde were designed for Century and Avant Garde magazines); for its characteristics (Excelsior and Paragon were designed for high legibility); or for its designer's fancy (Perpetua, Souvenir, Centaur). Type faces are also given generic names as well as brand names, e.g. different type-founder's call Times Roman different names, e.g. Times New Roman, Geneva, and English. Typefounders' versions of the same type face differ only slightly from each other. Even so you can, for example, seldom interchange one typefounder's 10-pt Baskerville with another's, to try to do so would result in a noticable mis-match with the original setting. To identify type or recognise a wrong font, you must know what the variables are, because differences amongst the thousands of type faces available today can be minute. Since an untrained eye cannot distinguish even gross differences, you should become familiar with the fundamental features of type that are labelled in the following diagram:
Type Categories To this end, you must be aware that not all type faces that are used have the same number of variations, or for that matter are available on the output device that you wish to use. Font A Commercial type font contains the usual range of characters that are needed for most forms of typesetting, i.e. one complete assortment of alphabet letters comprised of capitals and lower case, numerals, punctuation, special characters, and symbols. A type font is only available in one specific type face design. Therefore, a type face such as 10-pt Times Roman is considered to be one font and 10-pt Times Bold is another.
Purchasing the same font from two different type founderies may yield the addition or deletion of certain special characters. In Desktop Publishing, extra care must be taken when working across two or more platforms because certain characters from the same font and type foundry, accessible on the PC platform, are not available to the AppleMac. Currently, Expert fonts are limited to those fonts which are the most popular type faces. These fonts contain special characters such as `ligatures', `small caps' and `swash' letters that are not normally used, or needed, in the everyday world of commercial typesetting. For certain classes of bookwork and high-class typesetting purposes, their inclusion forms an invaluable addition to the finished result.
It is unfortunate that in many cases, the actual number of characters that typefounderies include into some of their expert fonts is small, necessitating the purchase of additional fonts to service particular typesetting needs. Pi fonts usually contain a collection of special characters such as mathematical, monetary or decorative symbols, etc.
If you have a special need for certain characters, most manufacturers will make a pi font to fit your need using standard characters or even develop new one to suit you. Symbol, Carta, and Zapf Dingbats are examples of common pi fonts. Series The actual range of sizes available in a font is dependent upon a number of interdependent factors such as:
Even today, there are still a remaining few dedicated typesetting systems still in use that are restricted to size increments of 1-pt and also, cannot set type above 36-pt. Family
The majority of fonts in common use have at least four variants, i.e. normal, italic, bold, and bold italic. The popular type design used above (Helvetica), has a family of over 50 varients, whereas many decorative and script style fonts such as Algerian, Arnold Boecklin Giddyup and Pepita, do not have a range of different variations and are usually restricted to a single font. When nominating a type face, the order of description can be thus:
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