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In typography, a typeface is a coordinated set of glyphs designed with stylistic unity. A typeface usually comprises an alphabet of letters, numerals, and punctuation marks; it may also include ideograms and symbols, or consist entirely of them, for example, mathematical or map-making symbols. The term typeface is typically conflated with font, which had distinct meanings before the advent of desktop publishing. These terms are now effectively synonymous when discussing digital typography. One still valid distinction between font and typeface is that a font may designate a specific member of a type family such as Roman, bold or italic type, possibly in a particular size, while typeface designates a visual appearance or style, possibly of a related set of fonts. For example, a given typeface such as Arial may include Roman, bold, and italic fonts.
The art and craft of designing typefaces is called type design. Designers of typefaces are called type designers, and often typographers. In digital typography, type designers are also known as font developers or font designers.
The size of typefaces and fonts is traditionally measured in points; point has been defined differently at different times, but now the most popular is the Desktop Publishing Point. Font size is also commonly measured in millimeters (mm) and qs (a quarter of a millimeter, kyu in romanized Japanese) and inches. |
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