About Fonts and Topography

In the 21st century, the era that were living, presentations, businesses ,  documents, and almost every kind of modern day job is done via the Web. Im pretty sure by now everyone is aware of typography as it is.But people look at it as it is put in front of them, many of them not being aware of the structure behind it that it stands on.
A font, represents the two major key elements that its structured from, Characteristic and Glyph. It colours the presentation with a formality,and a direction to head towards.There are millions of different types of fonts to be found online but it is considerably better to stick with one font for a document



One of the most important things in typography is CONTRAST:
This is a  subjective feeling that certain different fonts work together well, giving an impression of variety without losing harmony in the overall piece. Within a particular font, contrast also refers to the variety of stroke thicknesses that make up the characters.

Another Key element that puts a font into a design of its own is TRACKING: The tracking is the amount of space between letters and complete words which is very similar to another typography element KERNING, but not to be confused with it , because Kerning is the space between individual letters in a word.

Furthermore,typography also consists of WHITE SPACE:  which is the portions of blank space used in page layout to enable the text and other tools.
Darren Scott says "Say little, say it well. Good design is not so much about knowing what to put on the page, it's about knowing what to leave out."



A History of Western Typefaces looks at fonts from 1440 when Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type with the printing press

DIGITAL TYPE

  When an outline font is used, a rasterizing routine (in the application software, operating system or printer) renders the character outlines, interpreting the vector instructions to decide which pixels should be black and which ones white. Rasterization is straightforward at high resolutions such as those used by laser printers and in high-end publishing systems. For computer screens, where each individual pixel can mean the difference between legible and illegible characters, some digital fonts use hinting algorithms to make readable bitmaps at small sizes.

DISPLAY TYPE

  In the days of metal type, when each size was cut individually, display types were often cut that were adjusted for display use. These modifications continued to be made even after fonts started to be made by scaling using a pantograph, but began to fade away with the advent of phototypesetting and then digital fonts, which can both be printed at any size. Premium digital fonts used for magazines, books and newspapers do often include display variants, but they are often not included with typefaces bundled with operating systems and desktop publishing software

Decades into the desktop publishing revolution, few typographers with metal foundry type experience are still working, and few digital typefaces are optimized specifically for different sizes, so the misuse of the term display typeface as a synonym for ornamental type has become widespread; properly speaking, ornamental typefaces are a subcategory of display typefaces. At the same time, with new printing techniques, typefaces have largely replaced hand-lettering for very large signs and notices that would once have been painted or carved by hand


USE OF OTHER LANGUAGES 

A Latin text used in a sample of Caslon. The foreign language concentrates attention on the typeface design rather than the meaning of the text.

Here are examples of FONT METRICS that give us the basics about the style of the font.

  KERNING, TRACKING, AND LEADING

Kerning adjusts the space between individual letter forms, while tracking (letter-spacing) adjusts spacing uniformly over a range of characters.

   

TRacking is the space between 2 words.

 In typography, leading  refers to the distance between the baselines of successive lines of type