Also called body copy or running text, body text is usually the main written part of a document. Titles, subtitles, captions and others should be visually different from the body text so each type of information is clearly distinct and recognizable.

It is advised to set the body text at a size that is most comfortable for long reading: from 9 to 12 points for printed media and 16 to 18 points for digital screens.

While Regular is the most common weight for body text, Bold is a style often chosen to highlight a word or a sentence with a stronger emphasis than Italic.

In applications and tools that can process texts, to capitalize (or to set in All-Caps) is to transform every selected lowercase letter into its capital variant.

To inform a reader that a passage of text is a caption, it is usually placed near the image it is linked to, but it is usually also set in a smaller size and/or in a different style.

Some typefaces contain a specific caption style in the family with optimized details for specific use in small sizes, such as lower contrast and higher x-height.

By default, most punctuation signs and some characters are designed to be combined with lowercase letters because this is the most frequent situation.

When combined with capital letters, some of them need to be adjusted to be optically aligned with the capitals. These variants are required in a good typeface so the user can access enough tools for quality micro-typography. They are called case-sensitive alternates, usually attached with the extension “.case” and accessible or activated on applications supporting OpenType features.

A colophon (or imprint) is a suggestive list of information about the production of a work or project. It can range from names and roles of people involved, typefaces or brand and kind of paper used, manufacturer and location of production, to hosting domain for websites, and more.

In typography, we speak of “emphasis” when a section of a text needs to be visually brought forward or separated from the rest while keeping the paragraph’s setting, such as for a work’s title, comments, or a quote.

The most common way to create an emphasis in Latin based languages is to set the text in italic. Other scripts such as Chinese Hanzi and Japanese don’t have italics, and use different ways to emphasize text: bolder weight, underline, or dots.

In typography (or typesetting), a structure—called a grid—is designed on a page to place the elements, helping with the content’s organization and legibility.

A hypertext link is a part of digital text linked to another page or website.

It is often displayed underlined or highlighted in a different color or style.

Hyphenation is the management of word breaks (with a hyphen) wherever a word at the end of a line doesn’t fit. There are some rules about the usage of hyphenation, such as:

• position of the word-break in a word, which depends on the language and script;
• avoid it in capitalized words;
• avoid it in the last word of a paragraph or a column;
• avoid having more than three following lines with hyphens.

When typesetting a text, an indent indicates a new paragraph with a new line. It doesn’t have a “visible” sign so to speak, but it is equally considered a punctuation symbol.

In most word-processing applications, the indent symbol can be seen while selecting some text or activating the display of hidden characters.

Variable Font technology allows users to navigate within or use multiple variations between two or more specific styles (called masters) with high precision and much smaller font files. When we navigate between masters, we are looking at interpolations, which can be exported and used as individual font files, called instances.

Variable Fonts technology allows users to navigate within or use multiple variations between two or more specific styles (called masters) with high precision and much smaller font files.

When we navigate between masters, we are looking at interpolations. They are contours and shapes digitally interpreted from the data of two (or more) masters.

DESCRIPTION

Two construction styles are possible for the same weight in a Latin script typeface: Roman (or upright) and Italic. Italics have slanted letterforms, with more or less obvious influence from handwritten letter structure (connected letters) and shapes (softer starts and endings). In general, italic letters also have a slightly narrower width than their Roman companion.

For italic styles to be visually linked to the roman version, they have to be related to each other (similar weight, height, etc.). However, they also need to be different enough so the reader can easily identify one from the other. Managing a good balance between differentiation and similarity is part of the typeface designer’s expertise to design a “nice couple”.

HISTORY

The use of roman and italic styles as we do today started with the early printers of the 15th century, who used both styles for various applications to convey different impressions (emphasis, comments, etc.). During the Renaissance in Europe, when the Humanist movement came into popularity, revivals of handwritten calligraphic styles such as Carolingian Minuscule (all lowercase letters) and Roman capital letters carved on monuments (Capitalis Monumentalis) became most prominent due to their close relationship with ‘natural’ movements from the human hand.
While both roman (upright, interrupted) and italic (slanted, connected) styles were being used, the differentiation between them increased and ended up becoming two independent styles used for different purposes, which we are familiar with today. They also got their different names since that era, with ’Roman’ for the Roman alphabet which the handwriting takes inspiration from first, and ‘Italic’ came from the English writers who named the style of connected letters after the area where they knew it came from.

USE IN TYPOGRAPHY

Italic styles are mainly used in texts as a functional companion to the Roman in a typeface family. They are used when a part of a sentence or word needs to be emphasized from the rest, as with work titles, words in a different language, or words that need to be highlighted.

Not every writing system uses or even has Italic styles like in the Latin script. Instead, other scripts use different ways to achieve the same purpose of emphasis (use a different weight or specific punctuation).

A justified text is a block of text with each side aligned.

Depending on the length of the line, it often occurs that some of them don’t look even: too loose because of not enough words on the same line, or too compact with a long and unbroken word at the end.
Typographers would either adjust the tracking to fit more words or symbols in a line, and/or use hyphenation to ‘break’ words that are too long.

Some other type setting options (common for scripts written horizontally and from left to right) are centered, flush left / ragged right.

A layout is about the composition of graphic elements such as text blocks, titles, pagination, white spaces, images, etc, to create an aesthetic and functional combination.

The leading (also called ‘line spacing’) is the distance between two lines of text. For Latin scripts, that distance is measured between two baselines.

The word refers to the strips of lead used to separate lines of type during the metal type printing era.

A line of text that is too long or too short affects its readability.
Depending on the script and/or the document, there is an average number of words or characters for a comfortable reading.

In English, a “good” line length average is between 10 to 15 words.

A majuscule is a capital letter placed at the beginning of a sentence or the first letter of a name.

Note that all capital letters are not necessarily majuscules, such as CAPITALIZED words, which are made of capital letters.

Margins are the spaces around a composition block (left, right, top and bottom margins).

The metric system is a measuring system used nowadays in most countries around the world, where the units are the meter, gram, Celsius degree, etc.

The United States of America and countries that were part of the British Empire use the imperial system with feet, pounds and Fahrenheit degrees.

Opentype features are found in digital fonts with an OpenType format.

For the same glyph, there can be multiple variations (or alternates) along with their default form, as options for stylistic alternative or functional improvement. OpenType features can be activated in apps supporting them or with code lines calling them on a website, if they exist in the selected typeface.

Some principal features are: case sensitive, swashes, various figure styles (old style, tabular, proportional, etc.), and small capitals (or Small Caps).

When a typeface is intended to be used at some specific sizes only (large on billboards or small in printed books), some details can be optimized for each situation, resulting in optical size styles such as Text, Caption, Titling, or Display.

For text styles, aspects such as lower contrast and simpler details have been proven more efficient for reading small texts (especially if they are printed on rough surfaces), while display styles can carry elaborate details as they are seen in larger sizes.

Odd situations can happen when typesetting a text making its overall appearance look sloppy.

When the first line of a paragraph appears alone at the end of a column or a page, it is called an orphan.

In web typography, padding is about setting a specific distance between the sides of an element and its borders, like margins inside it.

Pagination is the page numbering system of a printed document.

Placeholder text (or Lorem Ipsum) is a fake text used to test the aspect of a typeface or a typographic composition.

In typography, points are measurement units to describe the size of a typeface (for printed or digital media).

Several units have been created and used over the centuries and across the globe, from the Didot to Cicéro and to the Pica and many others. Today, the international standard unit name is the (typographic) point. Font sizes are referred to as point sizes and indicated as pts.

FUNCTION

Small Capitals, or commonly just Small Caps, are letters with a capital letter structure but smaller in size (hence the name).

USAGE

They are used in texts when there are many capital letters together (initials, abbreviations, acronyms, Roman figures or all caps words in texts). In traditional typesetting where a new chapter starts with an initial or drop cap, the other letters of the first word or the entire first line can also be set in small caps to ease out the change towards the following text in lowercase.

HISTORY

The use of small caps started to be popular during metal type printing, as they added an additional option to the typographic palette, while keeping the same typeface.

Today, small caps are not present in every digital Latin typeface (they have their own Unicode values and are not in every Latin character set), as using small caps was more common in the ‘Latin’ world and used in traditional typography.

Some text processing or design applications can automatically generate small caps by scaling down capitals letters (just like they can do the same for italic or bold styles), but this is not advised for high quality typography, as the weight relation is much lighter.

DESIGN

Small caps have no precise height proportions compared to the capitals or lowercase, but a good ratio sits between these two heights.

Their weight and contrast should match those of the lowercase, and their height/width proportions are usually slightly wider than simply scaled-down capitals.

FUNCTION

For many writing systems (but not all), spaces separate words. Like punctuation symbols, they bring rhythm and clarity to a text and help with the reading experience. In the Latin script, several spaces with different widths are used for various situations (see Typographic Rules below).

HISTORY

In Ancient Latin, Roman capitals had no spaces between words. In some monuments, dots could be placed at middle height to help identify the words. In Europe, with the adoption of the Latin script, they started to appear in calligraphed manuscripts to help the readers identify the different words.

During the metal type printing era, blank pieces of lead were used as spaces between words. There were multiple widths for word spaces to help arrange text lines with precise length (em space, thin space, etc.). They lead to various rules in various languages and typographic traditions.

Nowadays, texts in the digital realm still make use of a variety of spaces for different situations in different languages, and also to offer different typographic options.

DESIGN

Spaces shouldn’t be too wide or too narrow. In Latin script based languages, a common convention is to set the width of the generic space glyph (U+0020) similar to that of the letter I or i.

TYPOGRAPHIC RULES

Many languages—including those commonly using the Latin script—have specific typographic rules.

One example: in French, before a question mark, exclamation mark, semi-colon or colon, there is a non-breaking space, whereas there isn’t any in English or other languages.

In digital typesetting, there are variable word spaces, breaking and non-breaking spaces, which give the text processing application the information on whether the width of the space can be adjusted or if the text line can or can not be broken at a specific place.

Whenever a file contains text using a font that isn’t installed on the user’s device, the system will replace it with another one as a fallback solution. It is a font substitution.

In most text processing tools, it is possible to apply a different style (Bold, Italic, Underlined, or Strike-through).

When those styles don’t exist already in the selected typeface, the system can “automatically” generate a similar effect even if it hasn’t been designed (this is not recommended, but can be handy if needed).

What is created in such a situation is called a synthetic font.

A template serves as a model for typography and typesetting. Like a reference guideline, it helps with the composition of the elements in a page (images, texts, spaces, grids, etc.), printed or on screen, to create a coherent and consistent document with specific design characteristics.

Fonts have spacing values for all glyphs that are defined by its designer.
If glyphs are too loose or too close to the needs (or taste) of the user, the spacing can be modified in most application tools for texts. It is called “to adjust the tracking.”

Typography (or typesetting) is the practice of assembling text elements in a design composition by defining multiple aspects such as the ratio between text columns and white spaces, choosing and using typefaces, setting their styles and sizes for all categories of texts, leading, justification style, and hyphenation, etc.

The person practicing typography is called a typographer.

Not to be confused with Typeface Design.

Measuring the sizes of fonts is made with a specific type of unit called points or pts.

Multiple types of units with various sizes and names have been used over the years and across the globe, from the Didot, Cicéro and Pica points to inches (and these are for Latin script only).

In type design, the width and/or spacing values of a glyph change depending on the weight of the style to ensure a visual balance. However, some typefaces are designed as uniwidth (also called multiplexed), which means that the same glyph keeps the same width across all weights and styles of the family.

This feature facilitates digital typesetting, especially when there is an interaction between the user/viewer and the text on a digital screen. For example, words or parts of text can switch to a different style without modifying the typesetting of the block while hovering or clicking.

Odd situations can happen when typesetting a text, making its overall appearance look sloppy.

When the last word or the last line of a paragraph appears alone at the beginning of a column or a page, it is called a widow.