A font, from Middle French
fonte, meaning "(something that has been) melt(ed)
[akin to Fondue]" and referring to letters of a
typeface produced by casting molten metal at a type
foundry, consists of a set of glyphs (images)
representing the characters from a particular character
set in a particular typeface. Historically, fonts came
in specific sizes determining the size of characters,
and in quantities of sorts or number of each letter
provided. The design of characters in a font took into
account all these factors. As the range of typeface
designs increased and requirements of publishers
broadened over the centuries, fonts of specific weight
(blackness or lightness) and stylistic variants—most
commonly regular or roman as distinct to italic, as well
as condensed) have led to font families, collections of
closely-related typeface designs that can include
hundreds of styles. A font family is typically a group
of related fonts which vary only in weight, orientation,
width, etc, but not design. For example, Times is a font
family, whereas Times Roman, Times Italic and Times Bold
are individual fonts making up the Times family. Font
families typically contain several fonts, though some,
such as Helvetica, may consist of dozens of fonts.
Helvetica, Century Schoolbook, and Courier are examples
of three widely distributed typefaces.
English-speaking printers have used the term fount for
centuries to refer to the multi-part metal type used to
assemble and print in a particular size and typeface.
Type foundries have cast fonts in lead alloys from the
1450s until the present, although wood served as the
material for some large fonts called wood type during
the 19th century, particularly in the United States of
America. In the 1890's mechanization typesetting allowed
automated casting of fonts on-the-fly as lines of type
in the size and length needed. This was known as
continuous casting, and remained profitable and
widespread until its demise in the 1970s. The first
machine of this type was the Linotype invented by Ottmar
Mergenthaler.
During a brief transitional period (circa 1950s –
1990s), photographic technology, known as
phototypesetting, produced fonts which came on rolls or
discs of film. Photographic typesetting permitted
optical scaling, allowing designers to produce multiple
sizes from a single font, although physical constraints
on the reproduction system used still required
design-changes at different sizes—for example, ink
traps and spikes to allow for spread of ink encountered
in the printing stage. Manually-operated
photo-composition systems using fonts on rolls of film
allowed fine kerning between letters without the
physical effort of manual typesetting, and spawned an
enlarged type-design industry in the 1960s and 1970s.
The mid-1970s saw all of the major typeface technologies
and all their fonts in use: letterpress, continuous
casting machines, phototypositors, computer-controlled
phototypesetters, and the earliest digital
typesetters—hulking machines with tiny processors and
CRT outputs. From the mid-1980s, as digital typography
has grown, users have almost universally adopted the
American spelling font, which nowadays nearly always
means a computer file containing scalable outline
letterforms ("digital font"), in one of
several common formats. Some fonts, such as Verdana, are
designed primarily for use on computer screens.
Digital fonts store the image of each character either
as a bitmap in a bitmap font, or by mathematical
description of lines and curves in an outline font, also
called a vector font. When an outline font is used a
rasterizing routine (in the application software,
operating system or printer) renders the character
outlines, interpreting the vector instructions to decide
which pixels should be black and which ones white.
Rasterization is straightforward at high resolutions
such as those used by laser printers and in high-end
publishing systems. For computer screens, where each
individual pixel can mean the difference between legible
and illegible characters, some digital fonts use hinting
algorithms to make readable bitmaps at small sizes.
Digital fonts may also contain data representing the
metrics used for composition, including kerning pairs,
component-creation data for accented characters,
glyph-substitution rules for Arabic typography and for
connecting script faces, and for simple everyday
ligatures like fl. Common font formats include
METAFONT, "PostScript" Type 1, TrueType and
OpenType. Applications using these font formats,
including the rasterizers, appear in Microsoft and Apple
Computer operating systems, Adobe Systems products and
those of several other companies.
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