A font when bought new would often be sold as (for example in a Roman alphabet) 12pt 14A 34a, meaning that it would be a size 12- point font containing 14 uppercase "A"s, and 34 lowercase "A"s. Unlike a digital typeface, a metal font would not include a single definition of each character, but commonly used characters (such as vowels and periods) would have more physical type-pieces included. The same distinction is also referred to with the terms majuscule and minuscule.
#Italic font manual
Upper- and lowercase letters get their names because of which case the metal type was located in for manual typesetting: the more distant upper case or the closer lower case. In a manual printing ( letterpress) house the word "font" would refer to a complete set of metal type that would be used to typeset an entire page. In traditional typesetting, the font would be made from metal or wood: to compose a page may require multiple fonts or even multiple typefaces.Ī 1910 letterpress poster, advertising an auction, using a variety of fonts In both traditional typesetting and modern usage, the word "font" refers to the delivery mechanism of the typeface. When used in computers, each style is in a separate digital "font file". The term "font" is correctly applied to any one of these alone but may be seen used loosely to refer to the whole typeface. For instance, the typeface " Bauer Bodoni" (sample shown here) includes fonts " Roman" (also 'Regular'), " Bold" and " Italic" each of these exists in a variety of sizes.
In modern usage, with the advent of computer fonts, the term 'font' has come to be used as a synonym for 'typeface' although a typical typeface (or 'font family') consists of a number of fonts. Each font is a matched set of type, with a piece (a " sort") for each glyph, and a typeface consisting of a range of fonts that shared an overall design. In metal typesetting, a font is a particular size, weight and style of a typeface.
The common technique shared by many font services like FontSquirrel or WebINK is to create additional declarations, creating a new font-family definition for each font weight and style.The Bauer Bodoni typeface, with samples of the three of the fonts in the family In particular, note the proper italic font includes a variant lowercase ‘a’ without the ascender, and bold characters have an even thickness to the stroke, rather than the wider vertical strokes on the faux-bold. The browser’s brute-force approach to creating these faux styles leaves a lot to be desired. It solves this by creating a faux-bold style by stretching the letters horizontally, and a faux-italic style by slanting the letters.įig a: comparison of faux browser styles and true typefaces The problem, as you can see in this screenshot, is that if you only load one font into the family, then the browser doesn’t know what to do when it’s asked to render a bold or italic section using that font. In CSS terms, you load a font file using declarations, which append that font to a font-family. eg, garamond-bold.ttf is the font copy of Garamond Bold, a typeface from the Garamond family. (If you’re not interested in an explanation of the problem or the bad solution recommended by most font-embedding services, go ahead and skip down to The Right Solution.) The Problemįirst, to clarify: A font is a file containing a particular typeface, which is a particular weight or style of a type family.
#Italic font how to
In this article, I’ll walk you through how to properly load your font files to avoid the browser’s faux-italic and faux-bold styles. Did you know that if you declare a custom font using the browser will try to fake the bold and italic styles if it can’t find them? This is a clever little feature that avoids a scenario where a themer specifies a font and is then confused that bold and italics don’t work, but it can be very confusing if you actually have a bold or italic version of the font.