The difference between “typeface” (or just “face”) and “font” is bedeviling. Garamond is a typeface. Easy. A typecase filled with all the letters, punctuation, numerals, and symbols of 12-point Garamond is a font. The typeface can have styles, like italic and bold. 14-point Garamond Bold is a font. A typeface is a design; a font is the collection of characters you can set type with. But today we use “face” and “font” interchangeably.
At one time, the compositor assembled characters in a composing stick one piece of metal at a time. The Linotype in 1886 eventually had a magazine with 90 channels to hold 26 caps, 26 lowercase, 10 numerals, about 16 punctuation, and other symbols accessed one key at a time. The most frequently used characters were closer to the assembling elevator and the keyboard was arranged ETAOIN SHRDLU. Early phototypesetter film strips also had 90 characters.
90 characters is not enough, and pi fonts gave us collections of math and other symbols. Once, Compugraphic used rub-down sheets of pi symbols to supplement their film fonts. These were called “CompuRub” (honest).
In the 1990s, there was a project to map every character and symbol in every language. Unicode is an industry standard designed to allow text and symbols from all of the writing systems of the world to be consistently represented. The Universal Character Set was published in book form as The Unicode Standard. It was a major accomplishment, and one of the byproducts was the word “glyph”: any graphical representation that conveys human intelligence. Instead of saying “character,” “numeral,” “symbol,” etc., you can just say “glyph.” A letter e is a glyph; a Chinese ideograph is a glyph.
Digital fonts were originally stored as bitmap font files that specified individual pixel locations for a font at a particular size. You needed a separate font for every size.
In 1981, Adobe developed PostScript and teamed with Apple. Printer fonts for the Apple LaserWriter (and Linotype Linotron imagesetter) were based on PostScript Type 1 outlines, resulting in excellent output at any size. Sampo Kaasila at Apple developed Bass (it was a scalable font format and you can scale a fish) that it licensed to Microsoft, who code-named it Royal. They asked me what they should call it and I said they should call it off. But they called it TrueType.
At a Seybold event in San Francisco, John Warnock of Adobe gave an impassioned speech in which he claimed Apple and Microsoft were selling snake oil, and later released the Type 1 format as a published standard for anyone to use. I still have that book. Apple eventually renewed agreements with Adobe for the use of PostScript in its printers.
TrueType accompanied the launch of Mac OS System 7 and Windows 3.1 in 1991. Adobe created Adobe Type Manager to scale Type 1 fonts onscreen and for output to any printer, much like TrueType fonts. Although ATM initially cost money, it became a de facto standard for desktop publishing.
In 1996, Adobe and Microsoft teamed to merge TrueType and Type 1 into a font format called OpenType. Apple extended TrueType with the launch of TrueType GX in 1994, a smart font technology that was part of QuickDraw GX. OpenType has now become the dominant smart font technology.
In partnership with Monotype, Microsoft created a set of TrueType fonts that were compatible with the core fonts bundled with PostScript equipment at the time. This included the fonts that are standard with Windows to this day: Times New Roman (compatible with Times Roman), Arial (compatible with Helvetica) and Courier New (compatible with Courier). “Compatible” means that the fonts are similar but not the same in look and have the same character widths so they can typeset documents without reflowing the text.
There are about 100,000 or more digital fonts. Adobe says 30,000 of these are Type 1 fonts. How many versions of Garamond do we really need?
Font Sing-Along
(To the tune of “I’ve Been Everywhere” by Johnny Cash)
I’ve set every face, man
I’ve set every face, man
Used an old type case, man
Em’ed and en’ed a space, man
Put type in a chase, man
I’ve set every face
I’ve set
Book-man
School-book
Bem-bo
Ho-bo
Bo-doni
No baloney
Galli-ard
Bern-hard
Avant Garde!
Aster
Basker
Gill Sans
No hands
Gara-mond
Dom font
Gara-mont
Fruti-ger
Mel-ior
‘cel-sior
Cour-ier
Cai-ro
Dee-do
Let’s go
I’ve set every face.
I’ve set every face, man
I’ve set every face, man
Used an old type case, man
Em’ed and en’ed a space, man
Put type in a chase, man
I’ve set every face
I’ve set
Frank-lin
Plant-in
Min-ion
Clar-en-don
Have some fun
Cas-lon
Tek-ton
Cax-ton
Hel-vet-ica
You bet-ica
Cen-taur
Tar-tan
Spar-tan
Uni-vers-ity
Uni-vers
I see
Civili-tee
Kar-nack
Cooper Black
Al-dus
Er-as
Mem-phis
Type is bliss
I’ve set every face.
I’ve set every face, man
I’ve set every face, man
Used an old type case, man
Em’ed and en’ed a space, man
Put type in a chase, man
I’ve set every face
I’ve set
Fu-tura
Bra-vura
Lu-cida
Ko-rinna
Rock-well
Ka-bel
Ar-ial
Chan-cery
Cent-ury
Gou-dy
Howdy
Copper-plate
Type is great
‘meri-cana
Dio-rama
Boldface
Oldface
Novar-e-se
Type is easy
Old style
Euro-stile
Car-tier
Blown away
I’ve set every face.
Copyright 2000 – 2007, All Rights Reserved, WhatTheyThink.com.
This article was last modified on January 9, 2022
This article was first published on July 18, 2007
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