Typography Terms Glossary: Typography Terms Glossary

[Book] edges

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Book edges are the top, bottom, and un-hinged outer sides of a book.

Ampersand

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

The ampersand is a symbol representing the conjunction “and”. The design goes back to the Latin ligature of “e” and “t”, meaning “and”.

Anti-aliasing

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

A method used to minimize aliasing (jagged and pixelated edges) from (for example) text outlines on pixel-based displays.

Aperture

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An aperture is the opening between the counter and the outside of the letter.

Apex

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Where two strokes meet at a small angle with the joint at the top.

Ascender

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An ascender is the portion of a lowercase letter that extends above the x-height.

Asterisk

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An asterisk (from Greek asteriskos: “little star”) is a typographical symbol, usually drawn as five-pointed or six-pointed star. It has various uses, like indicating a birth day or a wild card in computer science.

At sign

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

The at sign was originally an accounting and commercial invoice abbreviation meaning “at a rate of”. Today it is also used in email address and on social media platforms.

Backslanted (reverse italic)

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A backslanted Latin font is slanted to the left and therefore against the reading direction.

Ball terminal

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

Baseline

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In certain scripts (e.g. Latin, Cyrillic, Greek), the baseline is the line upon which letters (without descenders) sit.

Beak

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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.

Bed

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

Binocular g

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The double-story design of the letter g.

Black

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A font with a very large stroke weight.

Blackletter (Gothic script)

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A writing/type style within the Latin script with characteristic “broken strokes” used since the 12th century.

Block gauge

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An instrument used for controlling measurements of electrotypes, stereos, cylinder backings, rubber blocks etc.

Bodkin

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A bodkin is a piercing tool used in hand typesetting for extracting a piece of type from a form.

Body (Shank)

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The non-printing part of the physical letter.

Body text

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The text forming the main content of publications.

Bold

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A font with a stroke weight bigger than what would be considered “normal” or “regular”.

Book cover

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

Bracket

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

Calligraphy

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Calligraphy is the visual art of writing.

Cap height

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The height of a capital letter above the baseline for a particular typeface.

Case Sensitive Forms

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

Catchword [book]

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A catchword is a word placed at the foot of a handwritten or printed page that is meant to be bound along with other pages in a book. The word anticipates the first word of the following page. It was meant to help the bookbinder or printer make sure that the leaves were bound in the right order or that the pages were set up in the press in the right order.

Centered [text alignment]

Sat, 27 Jun 2015 06:24:04 +0000

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

Character encoding

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

Character set

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Any set of characters, e.g. of a specific font. Not to be mixed up with “character encoding”.

Character width

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The physical or virtual width of a glyph/character.

Chase

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

Colophon

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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.

Color

Sun, 21 Jun 2015 08:06:18 +0000

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).

Composing rule

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Composing rules (or setting rules) are metal strips to be placed inside the composing stick to set the measure, to remove the line more easily or to set one line of type over another more easily.

Composing stick

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A tool used to assemble pieces of metal type into words and lines.

Compositor (Typesetter)

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A person who sets type.

Condensed

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A font with a width smaller than what would be considered “normal” or “regular”.

Counter

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

Crossbar

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A horizontal stroke of a letter.

Cyma

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The cyma is an element employed to equalize the spacing of irregular letters by placing it where the space is open and requires something more than the plain letter to make word appear solid. This character derives its name from the Greek its undulating form resembling a wave. The cyma is usually attached to the letters A, L, M, W, etc.

Dash

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

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

Descender

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The part of a letter that extends below the baseline.

Desktop Publishing

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Desktop publishing (abbreviated as DTP) combines a personal computer and WYSIWYG design software to create publication documents.

Diacritical Mark

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

Diagonal Stroke

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Didone (Modern)

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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.

Discretionary Ligatures (dlig)

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Ligatures to be applied at the user’s discretion, e.g. for decorative purposes.

Display Font

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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”).

Distribute, break up

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Putting metal type back into the typecase after printing.

Double-storey a

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Drop cap

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A drop cap or initial is a letter at the beginning of a word, a chapter, or a paragraph that is larger than the rest of the text.

Ear

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

Ellipsis

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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.

Em (Square)

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Em dash

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En

Tue, 07 Mar 2017 13:10:29 +0000

An en is a typographic unit, half of the width of an em. By definition, it is equivalent to half of the height of the font.

En dash

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Endband

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An endband is a part of a (hardcover) book that consists of a small cord or strip of material affixed near the spine to provide structural reinforcement and decorative effect.

Endpaper

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An endpaper is a folded sheet of paper having one leaf pasted flat against the inside of the front or back cover of a book and the other pasted at the base to the first or last page.

Extended

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A font with a width greater than what would be considered “normal” or “regular”.

Face

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The part of a physical letter that gets printed.

Flong

Wed, 27 Jun 2018 17:42:15 +0000

A flong (or stereo mould) is a relief impression (in materials such as papier-mâché or plaster mould) of a forme created from handset metal type and/or printing blocks. It is used to cast a so-called stereotype, which is then used for printing.

Flush left (ragged right)

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Text aligned along the left margin.

Flush right (ragged left)

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Text aligned along the right margin.

Font

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A font is a set of symbols, which can be used for typesetting. In metal typesetting, each piece is called a “sort” and a each point size of a typeface makes up its own font. This is not the case for digital fonts, since they are scalable. The different fonts of a type family are usually referred to as “styles” (e.g. regular, italic, bold italic). Digital fonts are made up of characters and glyphs.

Fore edge

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

The fore edge is the edge of a book’s text block opposite the spine.

Foundry Type

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The original form of movable type meant for manual typesetting. (In contrast to the fonts made for hot metal typesetting since the end of the 19th century.)

Free endpaper

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The free endpaper is the inner leaf of an endpaper secured at its binding edge to the first or last page of a book. It is forming a flyleaf.

Front matter

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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.

Frontispiece

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

Furniture

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… wood or metal blocks of various widths and lengths to fill in the chase for lock up.

Galley

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A galley is a (usually metal) tray used for letterpress printing. The individual lines are first set in the composing stick and then combined to columns in the galley. The galley usually has 3 closed sides. The one open side is used to push the assembled column easily from the galley.

Galley Proof Press

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A (usually cylinder-based) printing press for creating proof prints from type locked up in a galley.

Galley rack

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A galley rack holds standing jobs on galleys.

Garalde (Aldine)

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

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

Glyph

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

Grades

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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).

Groove

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

Guillemets (French quotes)

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

Gutter or alley

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The space between columns.

Half title

Wed, 31 Jan 2018 09:46:27 +0000

The half title or bastard title is a page usually carrying only little information (like the title)—as opposed to the title page. The half title is usually the first page of the text block.

Hand composition

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The composition of movable type by hand—in contrast to hot metal typesetting.

Hand mould

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

Hanging indent (negative indent)

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Hardcover

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A book with stiff boards that is bound and covered in materials such as cloth, paper, or leather.

Headband

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The endband at the top of the book.

Headline

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Hinting

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

Hook (arch)

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Hot metal typesetting

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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.

Humanist (Venetian)

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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.

Hyphen

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The hyphen (‐) is a punctuation mark used to join words and to separate syllables of a single word.

Imposing stone or table

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An imposing stone (also known as composing stone) is a slab of usually stone or metal, on which the pages or columns of type are imposed/made into forms.

Ink ball

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An ink ball (or dabber) was a tool to apply ink to the plate or type to be printed. An ink ball usually consists of a piece of leather stuffed with wool and a wooden handle.

Ink trap

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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.

Italics

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

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

Justified

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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.

Kerning

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

Keyboard layout

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