If you are a novice designer, you undoubtedly have a lot of questions when working with text. This article is written to help you navigate through the basic terms and concepts and to make working with fonts easier.
Typography is the foundation of graphic design. A font is a specific outline of characters, their general image and size. But this definition should not be confused with the typeface - a set of characters that have a stylistic unity of outline. In simple terms, the font headset defines the general "family" of fonts (Times New Roman, Arial, Lucida.).
Fonts can be divided into four main groups: serif fonts (antique), sans serif fonts (grotesques), decorative and handwritten fonts.
For each typeface there are several types of lettering, the peculiarities of their representation - normal, italic, bold, and bold italic. These, of course, are not all the available types of lettering, but only the basic ones that all fonts have. Different variants of outlines and sizes of the same fonts are combined into one "family", the font family.
Kegel is the size of the area on which the letter is placed, in other words, it is the height of the letters of the font, including the upper and lower outline elements of the letter. Typically, the font size (point size) is measured in typographical points (denoted pt), 1pt = 0.35mm.
The baseline is an imaginary line that runs along the bottom edge of the main character element.
Kerning and tracking are two actions used to increase or decrease the distance between letters and spaces, but it is worth understanding their difference.
Kerning - changing the inter-letter spacing for individual character pairs. Usually kerning is done in the direction of reducing the space between the letters so that the protruding parts of one letter pair enter the free space of another letter. Kerning improves the visual perception of the text and harmonic uniformity. Kerning can be manual, when a person, guided by his own perception, achieving the desired rhythm of the line (which is good only for people with a perfect sense of proportions), or automatic, using certain programs that make it possible. Although, if you are not sure of the perfection of his vision, it is better not to engage in font design).
Tracking is a method of increasing or decreasing the density of a text block by changing the spacing between characters in the selected text or in the entire text block. Increasing tracking makes the text sparse and light, reducing - denser and darker. Tracking allows you to place a different number of characters on the same amount of paper. Knowing tracking will help you if you suddenly need to place an article and not enough space, or vice versa, the article has already ended, and the space in the paragraph is still left. However, you should not be too keen on tracking. It is allowed to change the text volume by 1-3% of the original, otherwise the text will be either sparse or too dense, which is visually striking and impairs the readability and overall perception of the text.
The grapheme is the basic form of a sign that allows you to distinguish it from any other sign, regardless of its artistic execution. The grapheme defines the unit of text, that is, it is only one character. For example, the basic form of the letter "A" makes it distinguishable from any other letter, no matter what font it is typed in.
A glyph is a specific graphic image (grapheme) of a sign. It happens that several glyphs for the same grapheme are used in the same text, then they are called each other's allographs.