A line above and/or below a paragraph.

Typesetting where both uppercase and lowercase letters are used.

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

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.

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.

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 ascenders and descenders like lowercase 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 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.

The overall height of a font.

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

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

Adjusting the distance between letters to achieve visually equal spacing.

Words with a horizontal line through their center.

A large type family, especially one which combines different classification types like slab serif, serif and sans serif.

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

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

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

A letterpress cabinet holds type cases with lettepress letters.

In computing, a character encoding is used to represent a repertoire of characters by some kind of an encoding system.

A device to cast identical multiple instances of any character from a matrix.

A typometer (also line gauge, compositor’s rule or type scale) is a ruler to measure typographic units. It can also have additional scales for other units such as millimeters.

Type-high means: of a height equal to the distance from the foot to the face of a type.

A sharpening tool for scissors, scythes, knives, razors, chisels and so on.

The flat surface of a printing press on which the type form is placed.

A flat plate in a printing press used for pressing the paper against the inked form. Presses with a hinged platen are named after this piece as “platen presses”.

A piece of thick, flat material, with a design on its surface, used to print repeated impressions of that design in relief printing. Also called cliché or electro (when created with the technique of electrotyping).

A line of type casted with a Linotype machine.

Front matter, or preliminaries (prelims, for short), is the first section before the body matter. The front matter contains things such as the title page, table of contents, frontispiece, foreword, preface and so on.

A frontispiece is a decorative or informative illustration facing a book’s title page.

The r rotunda (ꝛ) is a historical variant of the lowercase letter r.

Guillemets are a pair of punctuation marks in the form of sideways double chevrons (« and »), used as quotation mark.

The endband at the top of the book.

A book cover is any protective covering used to bind together and protect the pages of a book.

Any book with a cover made from flexible materials such as paper, cloth, leather, or vellum.

A printer's mark (or device, emblem, insignia) was a symbol used as a trademark by printers starting in the 15th century.

A colophon is a brief statement in a publication containing information like the place of publication, the publisher, and the date of publication. The colophon was formerly printed at the ends of books, but in modern works they are usually located at the verso of the title-leaf.

One part of a bicameral script with less ascenders and descenders. 

One part of a bicameral script with usually more ascenders and descenders.

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

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 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 non-printing part of the physical letter.

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

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

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

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”).

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”).

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

A typeface is a set of of glyph designs that share common design features.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.