Font

Font is design for a set of characters.

A font is the combination of typeface and other qualities, such as size, pitch, and spacing.

• The height of characters in a font is measured in points, each point being approximately 1/72 inch. 
• The width is measured by pitch, which refers to how many characters can fit in an inch. Common pitch values are 10 &12. 
• A font is said to be fixed pitch if every character has the same width.

History of font

The first European fonts were blackletter, followed by Roman serif, then sans serif and then the other types. ... Typefaces(also known as font family)

• A typeface (also known as font family) is a set of one or more fonts each composed of glyph that share common design features.
• Each font of a typeface has a specific weight, style, condensation, width, slant, italicization, ornamentation, and designer or foundry (and formerly size, in metal fonts).

Font metrics

1. Most scripts share the notion of a baseline: an imaginary horizontal line on which characters rest. 
2. The ascent and descent may or may not include distance added by accents or diacritical marks.
3. Conversely, the ascent spans the distance between the baseline and the top of the glyph that reaches farthest from the baseline.

Type setting numbers

Numbers can be typeset in two independent sets of ways: lining and non-lining figures, and proportional and tabular styles, making for four possible combinations.

                               (a)Hoefler Text uses non-lining or lower-case figures.

 (b)Proportional (left-side) and tabular (right-side) numeric digits, drawn as lining figures.

Roman typefaces

Serif typefaces

• Serif, or Roman, typefaces are named for the features at the ends of their strokes. 
• Times Roman and Garamond are common examples of serif typefaces. 
• Serif fonts are probably the most used class in printed materials 
• Serif fonts are often classified into three subcategories:Old Style, Transitional, and Didone (or Modern)

Fig:  The three traditional styles of serif typefaces used for body text: old-style, transitional and Didone, represented by Garamond, Baskerville and Didot.

San serif typefaces

• Sans serif (lit. without serif) designs appeared relatively recently in the history of type design. 
• Sans serif fonts used for display typography such as signage, headings, and other situations demanding legibility above high readability. 

                                       Fig: The sans-serif Helvetica typeface

Reverse-contrast typefaces

Reverse-contrast types are rarely used for body text, and are particularly common in display applications such as headings and posters.

CJK typefaces

• CJK(Chinese, Japanese and Korean) typefaces consist of wide ranging sets of glyphs. 
• They include all of the ASCII, European Roman glyphs and Cyrillic glyphs and often Persian, Hebrew and Arabic. 
• This commonly results in complex, often conflicting rules and conventions of mixing languages in type.

Monospaced typefaces

• The first monospaced typefaces were designed for typewriters, which could only move the same distance forward with each letter typed. 
• Monospaced fonts are still important for computer programming, terminal emulation, and for laying out tabulated data in plain text document.

Blackletter typespaces

Blackletter fonts, the earliest typefaces used with the invention of the printing press, resemble the blackletter calligraphy of that time.

About font MS office

Font is design for a set of characters. A font is the combination of typeface and other qualities, such as size, pitch, and spacing. 

Within Times Roman, however, there are many fonts to choose from different sizes, italic, bold, and so on.