Typography Terms

Typography Terms

Alignment - 	The positioning of text within the page margins. Alignment can be flush left, flush right, justified, or centered. Flush left and flush right are sometimes referred to as left justified and right justified.

Apex - 	The point at the top of a character such as the uppercase A where the left and right strokes meet is the apex. The apex may be a sharp point, blunt, or rounded and is an identifying feature for some typefaces.

Arm - 	The arm of a letter is the horizontal stroke on some characters that does not connect to a stroke or stem at one or both ends. The top of the capital T and the horizontal strokes of the F and E are examples of arms. Additionally, the diagonal upward stroke on a K is its arm. Sometimes arm is used interchangeably with bar or crossbar or cross stroke.
Arm is often also used to describe the mostly horizontal top stroke of C, double-storey a, G, and other glyphs, to include the finial, terminal, spur, or other elements of the stroke.

Ascender - 	The part of lowercase letters (such as k, b, and d) that ascends above the x-height of the other lowercase letters in a face.

Baseline - 	The imaginary line on which the majority of the characters in a typeface rest.

Beardline - 	The imaginary line that runs along the bottom of the descenders.

Bowl - 	in typography, the curved part of the character that encloses the circular or curved parts (counter) of some letters such as d, b, o, D, and B is the bowl. Some sources call any parts of a letter enclosing a space a bowl, including both parts of a double-storey g and the straight stem on a D or B. The curved strokes of a C are sometimes also referred to as bowls although they aren’t closed.
The shape and size of the counter and bowl can affect readability and is also an identifying factor for some typefaces.
At small sizes or at low resolution the bowls of some letters may fill in and appear solid. Print at a larger size, higher resolution, or change to a different typeface if this becomes an issue. Heavy typefaces or ones with normally small bowls and counters are especially prone to closing up.

Capitals – 	The set of large letters that is used in the initial position.

Capline - 	A line marking the height of uppercase letters within a font.

Counter - 	In typography, the enclosed or partially enclosed circular or curved negative space (white space) of some letters such as d, o, and s is the counter. The term counter may sometimes be used to refer only to closed space, while partially enclosed spaces in m, n, or h are the aperture. The shape and size of the counter and bowl (curved stroke enclosing the counter) can affect readability and is also an identifying factor for some typefaces.

Crossbar - 	The horizontal stroke in letters. Also known as a Bar.

Descender - 	The part of lowercase letters (such as y, p, and q) that descends below the baseline of the other lowercase letters in a font face. In some typefaces, 	the uppercase J and Q also descend below the baseline.

Dingbats - 	Typefaces that consist of symbol characters such as decorations, arrows and bullets.

Ear - 	Typically found on the lower case g, an ear is a decorative flourish usually on the upper right side of the bowl. Similar to a serif, the ear can be a distinctive, identifying element of some typefaces.

Eye - 	Much like a counter, the eye refers specifically to the enclosed space in a lowercase ‘e’.

Font - 	One weight, width, and style of a typeface. Before scalable type, there was little distinction between the terms font, face, and family. Font and face still tend to be used interchangeably, although the term face is usually more 	correct.

Grid – 	A grid is the skeleton or framework that allows for arranging content within the space of the page. It is the building block of all digital images and marks and is not a rigid formula, but instead a flexible, resilient structure.
As a designer the benefit of using a grid is to have the ability to arrange text in as many different ways within the structure of the grid as possible. The grid allows designers to experiment with variations of alignments, fonts, sizes, arrangements, and ideas quickly and easily in an orderly fashion.


Hairline - 	The short lines of emphasized text that introduce detail information in the body text that follows. Also the category of faces that are designed to work 	best in headline text.

Justification - 	A block of text that has been spaced so that the text aligns on both the left and right margins. Justified text has a more formal appearance, but may 	be harder to read.

Kerning - 	The adjustment of horizontal space between individual characters in a line of text. Adjustments in kerning are especially important in large display and headline text lines. Without kerning adjustments, many letter combinations 	can look awkward. The objective of kerning is to create visually equal spaces between all letters so that the eye can move smoothly along the text.
Kerning may be applied automatically by the desktop publishing program 	based on tables of values. Some programs also allow manual kerning to make 	fine adjustments.

Leg - 	The lower, down sloping stroke of the K and k is called a leg. The same stroke on R as well as the tail of a Q is sometimes also called a leg.

Line-length - 	Line length is determined by typographic parameters based on a formal grid and template with several goals in mind; balance and function for fit and readability with a sensitivity to aesthetic style in typography. Typographers adjust line length to aid legibility or copy fit. Text can be flush left and ragged right, flush right and ragged left, or justified where all lines are of equal length. In a ragged right setting line lengths vary to create a ragged right edge of lines varying in length. Sometimes this can be visually satisfying. For justified and ragged right settings typographers can adjust line length to avoid unwanted hyphens, rivers of white space, and orphaned words/characters at the end of lines (e.g.: "The", "I", "He", "We").

Lining figures - Unlike Old Style Figures that vary in height and position, lining figures are a modern style of numerals where all figures are of the same height (and typically larger than Old Style Figures in the same font) and rest on the baseline. Some fonts come with both Old Style and Lining Figures.

There are two common styles of Lining Figures:

Proportional Lining Figures work well alongside all caps (such as for headlines) because they are about the same size as the capital letters and sit on the baseline with them.
Tabular Lining Figures are monospaced and work best when rows and columns of numbers need to align such as in tables, financial documents, and numbered lists.

Link - 	In typeface anatomy, the link is that small, usually curved stroke that connects the bowl and loop of a double-storey g.

Ligatures - 	Two or more letters tied together into a single letter. In some typefaces, character combinations such as fi and fl overlap, resulting in an unsightly shape. The fi and fl ligatures were designed to improve the appearance of these characters. Letter combinations such as ff, ffl and ffi are available in all Adobe OpenType Pro fonts and selected Adobe OpenType Standard fonts.

Lowercase - 	The little letters or non-capital letters of the alphabet are lowercase glyphs. They make up the bulk of written text, with uppercase or capital letters used primarily only to start sentences or proper names.
	The term lowercase is derived from the days of metal type where the more frequently used letters were kept near at hand in the lower case while the less frequently used capital letters were kept in the harder to reach upper case.

Monospace - 	Old style figures - tyle of Arabic Numerals where the characters appear at different positions and heights as opposed to the modern style of all numerals at the same size and position are called Old Style Figures. Some Old Style figures sit entirely above the baseline while others (such as the tail on the numeral 9) descend below the baseline. Often Old Style Figures are available only in Expert Character Sets although some fonts may come with both Old Style Figures and Lining Figures (those that sit on the baseline).

Open Type - 	The OpenType™ format is a superset of the earlier TrueType and Adobe® PostScript® Type 1 font formats. As jointly defined by Microsoft and Adobe Systems, it is technically an extension of Microsoft's TrueType Open format, which can contain either PostScript font outlines or TrueType font outlines in a single font file that can be used on both Macintosh and Windows platforms. It can also include an expanded character set based on the Unicode encoding standard plus advanced typographic intelligence for glyph positioning and glyph substitution that allow for the inclusion of numerous alternate glyphs in one font file.

Orphans - 	One half of the term widows and orphans, an orphan is commonly defined as the first line of a paragraph or the subhead for a section of an article at the bottom of a column that is separated from the rest of the paragraph. The paragraph may continue
Some sources describe a lone word at the end of a paragraph or the last line of a paragraph at the bottom of a column or page as an orphan. Others call one or both of those a widow. The phrase widows and orphans is typically used to refer to all types of dangling words so you don't have to worry about which is which.


Picas - 	A unit of measure that is approximately 1/6th of an inch. A pica is equal to 12 points. The traditional British and American pica is 0.166 inches. In PostScript printers, a pica is exactly 1/6th of an inch.

Points -	A unit of measure in typography. There are approximately 72 points to the inch. A pica is 12 points.

PostScript – 	outline font specifications developed by Adobe Systems for professional digital typesetting, which uses PostScript file format to encode font information.

Posture - 	Posture is how the font is slanted on the paper. Posture is changed when the font is italicized

Rivers - 	In a paragraph of text, a series of wordspaces that accidentally align vertically or diagonally, creating an awkward flow of white space within the column of text.

Serif - 	Small decorative strokes that are added to the end of a letter's main strokes. Serifs improve readability by leading the eye along the line of type.

Shoulder - 	The curve at the beginning of a leg of a character, such as in an “m.”

Slab serif - 	A classification of typefaces which all have rather thick, heavy serifs. Typefaces with these heavy serifs can be either bracketed or unbracketed and still fit into this category.

Small caps – 	Capital or uppercase letters that are a smaller size than regular capitals in a given font are small caps. They are about the size of normal lowercase letters in a typeface. Small caps that are exactly the size of the lowercase letters are petite caps.
Small caps are commonly used for setting acronyms and common abbreviations (NASA, PM) because they are less obtrusive than normal size capitals when they appear in a paragraph of normal text.


Spine - 	he spine is the main left to right curving stroke in S and s. The spine may be almost vertical or mostly horizontal, depending on the typeface.
Beyond typography, a spine is specific type of a mathematical curve and the tool used for drawing it.


Spur - 	A small projection off a main stroke.

Stem - 	The stem is the main, usually vertical stroke of a letterform.

Stress - 	The orientation of the letterform, indicated by the thin stroke in round forms such as o, c and e.

Stroke - 	The main diagonal portion of a letterform such as in N, M, or Y is the stroke. The stroke is secondary to the main stem(s). Some letterforms with two diagonals, such as A or V have a stem (the primary vertical or near-vertical stroke) and a stroke (the main diagonal).
Other letter parts such as bars, arms, stems, and bowls are collectively referred to as the strokes that make up a letterform.


Tail - 	In typography, the descending, often decorative stroke on the letter Q or the descending, often curved diagonal stroke on K or R is the tail. The descender on g, j, p, q, and y are also called tails.

Terminal – 	In typography, the terminal is a type of curve. Many sources consider a terminal to be just the end (straight or curved) of any stroke that doesn’t include a serif (which can include serif fonts, such as the little stroke at the end of “n” as shown in the illustration). Some curved bits of tails, links, ears, and loops are considered terminals using the broader definition (see the Microsoft Typography site for further explanation).
Ball terminal is a combination of a dot (tail dot) or circular stroke and the curved bit (hook) at the end of some tails and the end of some arms (a, c, f). Beak terminal refers to the sharp spur or beak at the end of a letterform’s arm and the curved bit (terminal) between the beak and the arm.

Tracking - 	The average space between characters in a block of text. Sometimes also referred to as letterspacing.

Typeface - 	The letters, numbers, and symbols that make up a design of type. A typeface is often part of a type family of coordinated designs. The individual typefaces are named after the family and are also specified with a designation, such as italic, bold or condensed.

Type family - 	Also known as family. The collection of faces that were designed together and intended to be used together. For example, the Garamond font family consists of roman and italic styles, as well as regular, semibold, and bold weights. Each of the style and weight combinations is called a face.

Weight - 	The relative darkness of the characters in the various typefaces within a type family. Weight is indicated by relative terms such as thin, light, bold, extra-bold, and black.

Width - 	One of the possible variations of a typeface within a type family, such as condensed or extended.

Widows - 	One half of the term widows and orphans, a widow is commonly defined as a word or short phrase separated from the rest of a paragraph and left sitting at the top of the next column or the next page.
Some sources describe a lone word at the end of a paragraph or the first line of a paragraph at the bottom of a column or page as a widow. Others call one or both of those an orphan. The phrase widows and orphans is typically used to refer to all types of dangling words so you don't have to worry about which is which.

X-height - 	Traditionally, x-height is the height of the lowercase letter x. It is also the height of the body of lowercase letters in a font, excluding the ascenders and descenders. Some lower-case letters that do not have ascenders or descenders still extend a little bit above or below the x-height as part of their design. The x-height can vary greatly from typeface to typeface at the same point size.