The Penrith Museum of Printing
is located west of Sydney at the grounds of the Penrith Paceway, Ransley Street
Penrith, NSW Australia.
Phone: 0415 625 573
Email: pmop@printingmuseum.org.au
Font and Typeface
A typeface is the design of lettering that can include variations, such as extra bold, bold, regular, light, italic, condensed, extended, etc.
Each of these variations of the typeface is a font.
There are thousands of different typefaces in existence, with new ones being developed constantly.
The art and craft of designing typefaces is called type design. Designers of typefaces are called type designers and are often employed by type foundries. In digital typography, type designers are sometimes also called font developers or font designers.
Every typeface is a collection of glyphs, each of which represents an individual letter, number, punctuation mark, or other symbol. The same glyph may be used for characters from different scripts, e.g. Roman uppercase “A” looks the same as Cyrillic uppercase “А” and Greek uppercase alpha. There are typefaces tailored for special applications, such as map-making or astrology and mathematics.
The term typeface is frequently confused with the term font. Before the advent of digital typography and desktop publishing, the two terms had more clearly understood meanings. In metal typesetting, a font was a particular size, weight and style of a typeface. Each font was a matched set of type, one piece (called a "sort") for each glyph, and a typeface consisting of a range of fonts that shared an overall design.
In professional typography, the term typeface is not interchangeable with the word font (originally "fount" in British English, and pronounced "font"), because the term font has historically been defined as a given alphabet and its associated characters in a single size. For example, 8-point Caslon Italic was one font, and 10-point Caslon Italic was another. 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 include several fonts, though some, such as Helvetica, may consist of dozens of fonts.
The distinction between font and typeface is that a font designates a specific member of a type family such as roman, boldface, or italic type, while typeface designates a consistent visual appearance or style which can be a "family" or related set of fonts. For example, a given typeface such as Arial may include roman, bold, and italic fonts. In the metal type era, a font also meant a specific point size, but with digital scalable outline fonts this distinction is no longer valid, as a single font may be scaled to any size.
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