A Semester of Photoshop

Learning the World's Leading Image Editing Program

 

Chapter 23 — Text

Typography — Terms for Letterforms' Parts

 

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Typography — Definitions

Here's a list of important typographic terms. The first batch of 8 are the ones you really need to know for most Photoshop work but the others will be useful if you start to do a significant amount of design work involving typography.

Primary Terms for Photoshop Users:

  • Font — Before computers, a font was defined as a set of glyphs all of a given typeface and size; now it is generally used as a synonym of Typeface. So years ago Arial 10-point and Arial 12-point would have been considered different "fonts", whereas now they are usually referred to as two sizes of a single "font".
  • Typeface — A collection of glyphs designed with stylistic unity (a single style/design). A Font, by current parlence.
  • Body Size — The size (height) of the face of the type, usually specified in points. Nominally, this is the distance from just above the top of the ascender to just below the bottom of the descender. But... some people use the height of the uppercase letters to define body size. And some type designers seem to operate on their own whimiscal fancy when defining size.
  • Point — 1/72 of an inch.
  • Leading — (Pronounced "LEDD-ing") The (vertical) space between lines of text.
  • Tracking — The general spacing between all glyphs in a font (also called "letterspacing").
  • Kerning — The narrowing of the distance between specific letter pairs to improve the appearance of type. For example, with kerning applied, the letters "A" and "V" would be brought closer together than the normal tracking rules would.
  • Baseline — The imaginary horizontal line on which the glyphs of a font rest.

Secondary List of Terms:

  • Glyph — A representation of a character such as a letter, number, punctuation mark or symbol
  • Em space — An amount of space that can either the width of an uppercase "M" or the actual body size of a given font (sometimes both definitions are the same).
  • X-height — The height of a lowercase "x" in a given font.
  • Counter — An area enclosed within a letterform (like the center of "O", for example).
  • Ascender — A portion of a glyph that extends above the x-height of a font.
  • Descender — A portion of a glyph that extends below the baseline of a font.
  • Pica — 12 points (1/6 of an inch).
  • Serif — Serifs are the small features at the end of strokes within letters. Fonts that have these features are referred to as serif fonts and those without are called sans-serif fonts.
  • Sans-serif — French for "without serif". A font that does not have serifs on the characters. You are reading this text, presumably (depending on how weird your browser settings are), in a sans-serif font called "Verdana". This text, on the other hand, is in a serif font called "Times New Roman".
  • Proportional Font — A font in which the letters, numbers, etc. (glyphs) have different widths. Proportional fonts are by far the majority because they look more natural and are easier to read.
  • Monospace Font — A font in which every glyph has the same width. In monospaced fonts (like Courier, for example), all the letters, numbers and other characters have the same width. An "i", for example, has the same width as a "W".

Click here for a much more extensive list of terms and definitions.

 

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Web Resources for Typography

 

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Free Fonts to Download

Feeling your creativity stifled by the limited selection of fonts available on your computer (and their similarity to the fonts installed on everyone else's computer)? Want to get some new and cool fonts without spending a lot of money (or any money at all)? Here's your solution — web sites that offer free fonts for download.

Problems with Free (and cheap) Fonts

Free fronts can be a lot of fun and can be enormously helpful at times but there are some definite limitations and potential problems you should be aware of. Even with free fonts there's no such thing as a free lunch. Well, not entirely free...

Kerning issues — Many free fonts have limited or poor quality kerning tables. You should know how to cope with this in Photoshop (by adjusting kerning in the Character Panel), but it can add a lot of extra work to a project if a troublesome font is used extensively.

Missing Characters — Most free fonts have limited character sets and the extent of the limitation varies widely. Sometimes this might be just the lack of certain accented or special characters — like Ø or á — but in some cases free fonts might be lacking such basic glyphs as ampersands and even numerals. Before committing to the use of a particular font (even commercial fonts) you should confirm that it includes all the glyphs you're likely to need.

Licensing Issues — Some free fonts are free only for personal use; if they're going to be used for a commercial project they require the purchase of a commercial license. Be aware of just how "free" a free font is before comitting to its use in a design.

 

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Copyright © Mark Roberts

 

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