Glossary
A collection of useful font terms
- ANSI
- The American National Standards Institute - the name for the standard Windows character set. This is the same as Latin 1. See OEM.
- ASCII
- The American Standard Code for Information Interchange. There is an article about this in this library.
- Base Height
- The height of the Base Line.
- Baseline
- The line representing the bottom of most letters, such as 'A' and 'a'.
- Bit-mapped Fonts
- fonts made up of dots. Their data consists of a map of the dots and whether they are on or off.
- Caps Height
- The Height of a capital letter.
- Contour
- The name given to a single outline of a TrueType font. The letter 'O' has two contours.
- CPI
- Characters per inch, horizontally.
- Descender
- The part of a character that is below the baseline.
- DPI
- Dots per inch - as measure of resolution. A SVGA screen is 120 dpi.
- Diacritic
- These are acents characters that may appear with another character - such as the German umlaut.
- Emphasis -
- the character is thickened, either vertically or horizontally or both, by redrawing it in different positions.
- Em square
- This the measure of a standard capital 'M' in a font - it indicates the font resolution.
- Escapement
- See HMI.
- Fixed pitch
- all letters are the same width, 'm' and 'w' are squashed.
- Font
- set of printable characters of the same typeface and size.
- Glyph
- A glyph is the collection od data which defines a charcayter. It can apply to most types of font.
- Hexadecimal
- The name given to numbers to a base 16. It uses numbers 0 to 9 then A to F.
- Hinting
- The method of instructing a scaleable font, TrueType or Adobe Type 1, to ensure that it renders correctly in vaying circumstances.
- HMI
- Horizontal Motion Index, an indicator of movement for each character, also refered to as Escapement.
- Kerning
- The process of changing the standard character spacing to make the more pleasing. An example would be to reduce the gaps between VAW.
- Landscape
- use of paper with the longer side horizontal.
- Left margin
- in this manual this is the boundary of the left side of the letter that is next to the previous letter, see Left offset.
- Left offset
- the amount of overlap over the previous letter.
- Ligatures
- connecting of certain characters and printing them as one. Examples are 'ff', 'fl' and 'fi'.
- Lower case
- the group of letters usually refered to as 'small', see UPPER case.
- Magnification
- changing the size of a font by expanding, or contracting, the positions of the coordinates used to draw the lines which make up the characters. Unequal magnification will change the shape of the characters making them wider or narrower than the original.
- OEM
- The name given to the character set seen normally on a DOS screen. It is used in Windows as an alternative to ANSI.
- Pitch
- the horizontal spacing of the characters, also refered to as Characters per Inch (or CPI).
- Point
- the font height of the characters, in 72ths of an inch, also refered to as Lines per Inch (or LPI), so that 12 point represents 6 LPI.
- Portrait
- use of paper with the longer side vertical.
- Proportional pitched fonts
- have the letter spacing dependant on the size of the letter, with 'w' being much wider than 'i'.
- Right margin
- in this manual, the boundary of the right side of the letter, gives the width occupied by the letter.
- Sanserif
- a typeface without the finishing strokes on the arms and stems of characters.
- Scalable Fonts
- fonts which can be enlarged easily without too much distortion, usually formed by drawing lines between coordinate positions.
- Serif
- a typeface with finishing strokes on the arms and stems of characters, these strokes can take many forms.
- Style
- the term used to specify 'italic' or 'upright' characters.
- TSR
- Terminate and Stay Resident programs, which when run, installs itself and remains in memory for further use.
- Typeface
- the design of a set of characters which is distinctive and for a particular use or effect, such as 'Roman' or 'Old English'.
- Upper case
- the group of letters usually refered to as 'CAPITALS'.
- Vector font
- A font produced by drawing lots of little straight lines, also known as a Stroke font
- x Height
- The height of the character 'x', lower case.