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What is Font

A font is a specific typeface of a certain size and style. For example, one font may be Arial 12 pt bold, while another font may be Times New Roman 14 pt italic. Most word processing programs have a Font menu that allows you to choose the typeface, size, and style of the text. In order to use a font, you must have it installed on your computer. Windows provides access to fonts using the Fonts control panel. The Mac OS stores fonts in a Fonts folder and includes a separate "Font Book" application for managing fonts.

A font is a set of printable or displayable text character s in a specific style and size. The type design for a set of fonts is the typeface and variations of this design form the typeface family . Thus, Helvetica is a typeface family, Helvetica italic is a typeface, and Helvetica italic 10-point is a font. In practice, font and typeface are often used without much precision, sometimes interchangably.

An outline font is a software typeface that can generate a scalable range of font sizes. A bitmap font is a digital represention of a font that is already fixed in size or a limited set of sizes. The two most popular outline font software programs on today's computers are TrueType and Adobe's Type 1. TrueType fonts come with both Windows and Macintosh operating systems. However, Type 1 is a standard outline font (ISO 9541). Both TrueType and Type 1 fonts can be used by Adobe's PostScript printers (although Adobe says that Type 1 fonts makes fuller use of the PostScript language).

Independent developers and graphic designers create new typefaces for both TrueType and Type 1. Adobe states that there are over 30,000 Type 1 fonts available. Fonts (in addition to those that come with your computer) can be purchased as individual typeface families or in typeface collections.

Size of The Font

Font sizes are an important part of Web design because they are the first hurdle to overcome in creating a page that is readable by your customers. Fonts that are too large take up too much space on the page and are as unreadable as ant-sized tiny fonts.

Define Font Sizes in Four Ways

• Absolute sizes define the size of the font according to the sizes defined in the user-agent. Absolute font sizes include: xx-small, x-small, small, medium (the default), large, x-large, and xx-large.
• Relative sizes define the size of the font relative to the parent element. Relative fonts are either the same size as the parent, larger, or smaller.
• Lengths specify a font size that has an absolute measurement of some kind. Lengths include relative lengths (em, ex, px) and absolute lengths (in, cm, mm, pt, pc).
• Percentages specify an absolute font size relative to the parent element's font size.

Font Sizes and Accessibility

When choosing font sizes remember to keep accessibility in mind. As a 22-year-old Web designer, you might have better eyesight than your site's 52-year-old demographic. Making fonts tiny may seem to make the page more visually interesting, but often your readers will just ignore what they can't read and move on.

The best way to make your font sizes accessible is to design in ems. Ems allow your fonts to scale up or down as your readers change their font sizes in the browser. And while you might not want them to change their font size, the fact is that they will, so you might as well design for it.

There are many different measures you can use with your font sizes. But most people just use pixels or points and don't think any more about it. However, by doing that they may be causing problems for some readers. It's important to think about how your site will be used and the audience before you decide on what font measure to use.

Fixed Height Font Measures

There are several absolute or fixed-height font size measurements:

• inches (in)
• centimeters (cm)
• millimeters (mm)
• points (pt)
• picas (pc)

But absolute font sizes aren't generally good for Web pages. The only time you should use absolute font sizes is if you're writing a style sheet to print out your Web page - in other words, the Web page will be a fixed size on the paper.

Relative Font Measures

Relative font sizes size the font based on the value of another length property. Relative font sizes include:

• Ems (em)
  Based on the default preference set in the customer's browser
• X-height (ex)
  Based on the height of the lowercase x character.
• Pixels (px)
  Based on the resolution of the screen.
• Percentages (%)
  Like ems, based on the default preferences of the browser

Most people prefer points, as they think that they will get a more precise page layout that way and most print designers are more familiar with points. However, Macintosh and Windows computers display points differently because the two machines have a different DPI. Also, Netscape 4.7x doesn't display pixel values correctly on either machine. So, it's not a good idea to use points.

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posted by peterdj @ 2:04 AM