A line above and/or below a paragraph.

Typesetting where both uppercase and lowercase letters are used.

The area(s) of a letter entirely or partially enclosed by the letter form.

Replaces (by default) sequence of characters with a single ligature glyph.

The distance between the baseline and the upper part of lowercase letters that don’t have ascenders.

A design feature of a typeface or glyph where the end of a stroke takes a roughly circular shape.

A triangular or wedge-like protrusion at the end of a stroke. Can also be understood as part of the serifs of a typeface. Some also call them spurs to separate them from serifs.

The double-storey design of the letter g.

An ear-like stroke, which usually only appears in the design of a double-story g.

In typesetting by hand compositing, a sort is a piece of type representing a particular letter or symbol.

The non-printing part of the physical letter.

The top part of the metal block on which the letter design sits.

A mostly curved (but sometimes more wedge-like) connection, which might appear for example at the connection of a serif and a stem.

Fonts made for a use in larger sizes and short passages (e.g. in logos, headlines), but not for longer texts. Not to be confused with fonts made for screen use (e.g. on electronic “displays”).

An ellipsis is a character consisting of usually 3 dots. It usually indicates an intentional omission of a word, sentence, or whole section from a text. Depending on the script, the dots can be arranged in different directions.

Text aligned along the left margin.

Text aligned along the right margin.

Text that is aligned to neither the left nor right margin. There is an even gap on each side of each line.

Text is aligned along the left and right margins, and letter- and word-spacing (sometimes also character width) are adjusted so that the text falls flush with both margins.

Named after Claude Garamond and Aldus Manutius, these fonts are between the the early (“humanist”) and late (“transitional”) oldstyle designs.

The first Roman typefaces created during the 15th century by Venetian printers. These typefaces sought to imitate the formal hands found in the humanistic (renaissance) manuscripts of the time.

Transitional typefaces appeared at the end the 17th century. They are still considered oldstyle designs, but already show characteristics (e.g. [almost] vertical stress, increased stroke contrast) of the Modern typefaces which follow during the 18th and 19th century.

The Didones draw their name from Didot and Bodoni. Dating from the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century, these designs have a strong contrast between stems and hairlines, a purely vertical stress and unbracketed, hairline serifs.

A set of characters, which is used as the standard method of writing in most Western and Central European languages, as well as many languages from other parts of the world.

Figures with ascenders and descenders like lowercase letters.

Versions of a typeface tailored for use at specific size ranges (e.g., “caption”, “text”, “display”, etc.). Differences in contrast and tracking are common.

Rounded or pointed letters will usually have an overshoot, which means the character design extends over the x-height, cap height or under the baseline to make the letter appear of equal size with the rest of the letters.

Phototypesetting was a method of setting type, that was used in the second half of the 20th century. Light is projected through a negative of the glyph and exposes photosensitive film or paper.

The overall height of a font.

The practice, action, or system of inserting points or other small marks into texts, in order to aid interpretation; division of text into sentences, clauses, etc.

A sign used as a punctuation mark and for various other purposes.

The main vertical strokes of letters.

The characteristic change of stroke width across all letters of a font. The stress is usually either diagonal, vertical, or there is no or hardly any stress for typefaces with no obvious change of stroke widths.

A swash is a decorative element added to a glyph or a glyph containing such decorative elements.

A descending often decorative stroke.

A way of typesetting where the centered lines gradually change their width, usually becoming narrower at the end of a text or segment.

Roman refers to the upright styles of the Latin script in contrast to italic styles or special categories such as blackletter.

Characters, especially punctuation, with forms better suited for all-capital text.

The space between columns.

Rivers, or rivers of white are gaps which appear to run through a paragraph of text, due to a coincidental alignment of spaces.

A tool used for letterpress printing to set the rollers to the correct height.

A solid flat or semi-circular plate of type metal, usually of an entire artwork or page of handset type, created from a stereo mould (see flong).

Logographic printing was a form of moveable type printing where the font contained words or parts of words rather than single letters. The logographic type was used in the same way as the common letterpress ligatures. The difference was the purpose of using letter combinations specifically to speed up the typesetting process. But with hundreds of compartments in a typecase, logographic typesetting was also very challenging. The system never came into broad use.

A ligature is an visual and/or technical connection of two ore more letters or glyphs.

A (usually cylinder-based) printing press for creating simple proof prints.

A tympan is made from a soft material (such as parchment, leather, paper, rubber). It is used for letterpress printing and covers the the platen or printing cylinder while printing. It provides a necessary flexibility and can also be used to adjust the printing pressure. The tympan can be mounted permanently on the platen or printing cylinder or it mounted to a frame, which is then put between the platen and the forme while printing.

A chase is a metal frame used to hold type in place while printing.

The part of a physical letter that gets printed.

A notch that is identical for all letters of a typeface and helps the printer to make sure that all letters belong to the same font and are placed in the right direction in one line of type.

The groove at the bottom (or “foot”) of the letter is the result of the manufacturing process.

In the field of typography, color refers to the perceived density of type on its background. It is mainly dependent on the type design (e.g. the weight of the font), but also the typesetting parameters (e.g. tracking, line-spacing).

A horizontal stroke of a letter.

A horizontal stroke used as punctuation mark. The specific function depends on the horizontal length (e.g. “en dash”, “em dash”).

A diacritical mark is a glyph added to a letter, or base glyph.

A square with side lengths equal to the point size. The name comes from metal type where the capital letter M was commonly cast the full-width of the square blocks.

In a font, a glyph is a specific representation of one or more characters.

Grades are subtle changes in stroke weight, which (where available) can be selected to give a similar impression of the typeface under different conditions (e.g. different printing technologies and papers).

Processes which are supposed to optimize the output of glyphs on a rasterized grid (e.g. screen).

Hot metal typesetting refers to machine-based typesetting technologies, where molten type metal is injected into a mold that has the shape of one or more glyphs. Examples of such machines are the Linotype and the Monotype.

When strokes meet at certain angles, they can be designed more open, forming a so-called ink trap. This can avoid a physical or optical ink blob in that area.

Italic type is a cursive font based on a stylized form of calligraphic handwriting. Usually (but necessarily) italics appear slanted.

The process of adjusting the spacing between specific glyphs in a font.

Leading is the space between lines of letterpress type. It is called leading because the material to fill this space was originally made from lead. The term is often used for digital typesetting as well, but stands for the distance between consecutive baselines in this context. See “line spacing” for more information.

Legibility is the ease with which a reader can recognize individual symbols.

A letter is a written character in an alphabetic system of writing.

Letterpress printing is a technique of relief printing using a printing press, a process by which many copies are produced by repeated direct impression of an inked, raised surface against sheets or a continuous roll of paper.

Figures with a uniform height similar or equal to the cap height of the font.

The point is the default unit of measure in typography, used for example to define the size of type. In digital typography the point is defined as 1⁄72 or 0.0138 of the international inch.

Figures with an individual width, based on the glyph design.

Figures with an identical width.

A text passage from an article that is displayed larger as a graphical element.