Letterforms drawn or written without contrast.

A decorative illustration on a block used in printing along with the text, e.g. at the beginning or end of a book or chapter of a book.

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.

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 pastedown endpaper is the portion of the endpaper that is glued to the inner boards of a hardback book.

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.

The endband at the top of the book.

The endband at the bottom of a book.

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

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

A usually small and cheap book with a paper cover and glued pages. A paperback book will be a softcover book at the same time, but not every softcover book can be considered a paperback.

String used for tying up a columns or pages of letterpress type after making up. This is done to to secure the columns or pages temporarily until they are imposed or to store them (see standing matter).

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

A type founder is a person who is casting metallic printer's type.

A flong (also mat 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.

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).

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.

Plakadur was a brand name for a resin-based material used for display letters of the Berthold AG in the 20th century as an alternative to wood type.

A thread counter or linen tester is a magnifying tool, where the lens is mounted at a fixed distance above the object being put under the tool. It was originally invented to check the quality of woven fabrics. But it also became a common tool in the printing industry.

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

A glyph to represent glottal stop or glottal plosive.

Smaller (leads) or thicker (slugs) strips used as spacing material in letterpress printing, especially to to increase the line height.

Line spacing, interline spacing, line height or leading is the distance between the baselines of successive lines of type. The term leading has its roots in letterpress printing where it referred to the lead strips added between the lines.

Serif is a font classification category, which includes fonts having serifs (i.e. small strokes regularly attached to the end of a larger strokes).

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.

Slab serif typefaces are characterized by their thick, block-like serifs.

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

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.

An OpenType variable font is one in which the equivalent of multiple individual fonts can be compactly packaged within a single font file. This is done by defining variations within the font, which constitute a single- or multi-axis design space within which many font instances can be interpolated.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Sans serif (from French “sans” meaning “without”) is a category of typefaces that do not have serifs.

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

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

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

A font with a very large stroke weight.

A small line attached to the end of a stroke in a letter.

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

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.

Small capitals (or just small caps) can be used in bicameral scripts. They use the design of capital letters, but are smaller (roughly the size of the lowercase letters) and usually replace the lowercase letters.

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

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.

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

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).

The block of paper formed by the cut and stacked pages of a book, not including covers, boards, end papers, dust jacket or other accoutrements.

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.

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.

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.

The Spine of a book refers to the outside edge of the book where the pages are gathered and bound.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Figures with ascenders and descenders like lowercase letters.

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.

Monospaced describes a font whose letters and characters each occupy the same amount of horizontal space.

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

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.

A person who sets type.

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

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

In typography, style refers to the individual members of a type family, e.g. regular, italic, bold.

An underline is a horizontal line immediately below a portion of writing.

The non-printing part of the physical letter.

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