Fonts that aren’t typefaces?

[Ralf Herrmann]

I usually use the terms font and typeface as it is summarized nicely in this FontFeed article.  http://fontfeed.com/archives/font-or-typeface/

As a result, there can be cases, where the term typeface is applicable, but font is not. I wonder if there are cases for the other way around? 

In German and according to my use that is the case. The German word for typeface is “Schriftart”, which has the meaning of “the written word” in it and as a result, I would avoid the term for the design of a dingbat font for example, since there aren’t any letters in it. But I am unsure whether this is similar in English. What do you think? 

[Wrzlprmft]

In the times before OpenType, typefaces that had alternative characters were often distributed in different fonts activating these alternative characters (e.g., you had one font for uppercase and one font for lowercase numbers). This also makes sense nowadays for fonts with tons of features (e.g., I made several fonts for Unifraktur Maguntia that correspond to activating a given set of features) or that are expected to be used in an environment, were feature selection is not feasible (e.g., the Monoid font for coding can be downloaded in several such variants).

 

When I refer to such variants, I would only use the the term font and not typeface. For example, I would not use typeface in the following sentence: “The font foo_a.ttf uses the alternative a by default.” This ties nicely into the song/audiofile analogy, if you think of different audiofiles of the same song: “This is another OGG of the live version of Broken-Hearted Roadkill on the Highway of Romance, without the applause at the end.”

 

Another case would be different font formats, such as TTF and OTF: “You can obtain this typeface as an OTF or as a TTF font.” The corresponding song/audiofile analogy is left as an exercise to the reader.

[Riccardo Sartori]

On 1/4/2016 at 8:18 AM, Ralf Herrmann said:

there can be cases, where the term typeface is applicable, but font is not. I wonder if there are cases for the other way around?

I would dare to say there are many more.

From the metal sorts of yore (but also fleurons, and frames, and music), to emoji fonts and icon webfonts, the technical means to reproduce type were always used for other different purposes (albeit related in some way).

An analogy could be novel/book = typeface/font. Book is often used as a generic term in lieu of more appropriate or specific ones, but it defines a technical mean of reproduction of many (related) different things.