Fonts - The Final Frontier

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 we use face and font interchangeably today.

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).

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About Frank Romano

Frank Romano has spent over 60 years in the printing and publishing industries. Many know him best as the editor of the International Paper Pocket Pal or from the hundreds of articles he has written for publications from North America and Europe to the Middle East to Asia and Australia. Romano lectures extensively, having addressed virtually every club, association, group, and professional organization at one time or another. He is one of the industry's foremost keynote speakers. He continues to teach courses at RIT and other universities and works with students on unique research projects.