Font, the main features, categories (families) and the most famous characters of all time.

The characters or more modern font, the characteristics that distinguish them and break them down into families (categories) and references to fonts most famous ever.

Those who once were called in typography typefaces, nowadays, where computer technology has taken over in all areas including that of typography, fonts are commonly called fonts.

The font looks like a file to be installed in the operating system of your computer, it is a set of typefaces united by stylistic features and graphics equal.

Each font is a collection of letters (uppercase and lowercase), numbers, punctuation and symbols called “glyphs”, this set creates its own font style.

It is thought that the word font takes its origin from medieval France, where the characters were cast in metal called “source”, from the Latin language referred to a molten thing.

Font computer has all the characteristics of vector graphics (aspect already examined earlier in our website), in fact the individual glyphs have an absolute scale, its vector graphics, enlarging the font size is no loss details as it would happen in the field of raster graphics or bitmaps.

The metric to define the size of a font is the typographical point (abbreviated pt.), The typographical point is equivalent to 1/72 of an inch (about 0.35 mm.).

Important aspect of this evolution in the field of typography is the infinite number of graphics solutions text available to us today, until 20 years ago with the movable molten lead in a printing house equipped very well could have provided a few dozen font styles , nothing to do with the hundreds of thousands of fonts available today in the free or paid web!

To orient ourselves in this immense number of fonts it was necessary to divide families, characters who share similar stylistic features are classified and encased in specific categories.

Serif and sans serif.

Difference between fonts and Sans Serif fonts Serif

One of the first parameters to unite stylistic character has ancient origins, even it puts the time index of its roots to ancient Rome. The ancient Roman stonemasons in play characters lapidary had difficulty in recreating a right angle to the termination of the individual letters, to remedy this problem recreated features appendices at the end of the auction of letters called today “thanks”.

Today in computer fonts are divided between those “with thanks” and the “no thanks”, known more commonly fonts “serif” and “sans serif”.

The most famous.

Among the most famous characters serif remember the timeless “Times“, “Times New Roman” (Microsoft), “Bodoni” and “Palatine“, are part of the opposing family of sans serif “Helvetica“, “Arial” (Microsoft) , “Gill Sans” and “Avant Garde“.

Categories of fonts could not enumerate dozens without however forgetting some, but among the most common we want to remember the “Calligraphy“, the characters “Gothic“, the “Handwriting” and so-called “Comics“.

The web is full of sites more or less reliable where to download a font, make sure school sites like dafont.com, where you can download thousands of free fonts, or fonts.com, site Prince to purchase fonts licensed a fee.