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

A font with a very large stroke weight.

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

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

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

Figures with ascenders and descenders like lowercase letters.

Figures with an identical width.

The foundation of typography—individual letters meant to be set and printed.

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”).

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

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 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.

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.

The double-storey design of the letter g.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Text aligned along the left margin.

Text aligned along the right margin.

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

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.

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.

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

A type case is a compartmentalized (usually wooden) box used to store movable type used in letterpress printing.

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).

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

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.

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

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

The main vertical strokes of letters.

A horizontal stroke of a letter.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Lettering refers the act, art, or technique of inscribing letters on to something or the letters created in such a way. In the field of professional graphic design, lettering is understood as one of three technique to create textual information beside calligraphy (“writing”) and typography (“typesetting”).

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.

The space between columns.

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 bar of softer metal (e.g. copper or nickel + brass) in which the punch is driven into to create a “sunken” image of a letter. Once the matrix was “fitted” it can be used to cast letters.

The part of a physical letter that gets printed.

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

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

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

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

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.

Letterforms drawn or written without contrast.

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

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

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.

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.)

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”.

Words with a horizontal line through their center.

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.

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

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

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

The overall height of a font.

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