What the font manual#

Some metal type characters required in typesetting, such as dashes, spaces and line-height spacers, were not part of a specific font, but were generic pieces which could be used with any font. The rest of the characters would be provided in quantities appropriate for the distribution of letters in that language. A font when bought new would often be sold as (for example in a Roman alphabet) 12pt 14A 34a, meaning that it would be a size 12- point font containing 14 uppercase 'A's, and 34 lowercase 'A's. Unlike a digital typeface, a metal font would not include a single definition of each character, but commonly used characters (such as vowels and periods) would have more physical type-pieces included. The same distinction is also referred to with the terms majuscule and minuscule.

What the font manual#

Upper- and lowercase letters get their names because of which case the metal type was located in for manual typesetting: the more distant upper case or the closer lower case. In a manual printing ( letterpress) house the word 'font' would refer to a complete set of metal type that would be used to typeset an entire page. In traditional typesetting, the font would be made from metal or wood: to compose a page may require multiple fonts or even multiple typefaces.ДЄ 1910 letterpress poster, advertising an auction, using a variety of fonts In both traditional typesetting and modern usage, the word 'font' refers to the delivery mechanism of the typeface. When used in computers, each style is in a separate digital 'font file'. The term 'font' is correctly applied to any one of these alone but may be seen used loosely to refer to the whole typeface. For instance, the typeface ' Bauer Bodoni' (sample shown here) includes fonts ' Roman' (also 'Regular'), ' Bold' and ' Italic' each of these exists in a variety of sizes. In modern usage, with the advent of computer fonts, the term 'font' has come to be used as a synonym for 'typeface' although a typical typeface (or 'font family') consists of a number of fonts. Each font is a matched set of type, with a piece (a ' sort') for each glyph, and a typeface consisting of a range of fonts that shared an overall design. In metal typesetting, a font is a particular size, weight and style of a typeface.

The Bauer Bodoni typeface, with samples of the three of the fonts in the family