About Typography in Windows NT

A typeface is a set of characters that share common characteristics (such as stroke width and the presence or absence of serifs). For example, Arial and Courier are both typefaces. Frequently, both the typeface and its name are copyrighted and/or trademarked by the typeface designer or manufacturer.

In Windows NT, a font is the name of a typeface, excluding attributes such as bold or italic. This general definition is more widely used than the traditional definition associated with traditional typography. For example, MS Serif is a font in Windows NT.

In Windows NT, a font family refers to a group of typefaces with similar characteristics. The families that Windows NT recognizes for font installation and mapping are Roman, Swiss, Modern, Script, and Decorative. For example, the sans serif typefaces Arial, Arial Bold, Arial Bold Italic, Arial Italic, Small Fonts, and MS Sans Serif are all part of the Swiss font family.

For printing and display in a computer system, each raster or vector font has its own character set according to the ASCII, ANSI, or original equipment manufacturer (OEM) standard or to another industry standard that defines what character is represented by a specific keystroke or combination of keystrokes. Most TrueType fonts shipped with Windows NT support multiple character sets. For more information about raster, vector, and TrueType fonts, see "About Windows NT Fonts" later in this chapter.

The following basic terms are used in Windows NT to define the appearance of a font in an application:

• Font style refers to specific characteristics of the font. The four characteristics you can define for fonts in Windows NT are italic, bold, bold italic, and roman. (Roman is often referred to as Normal or Regular in font dialog boxes).

• Font size refers to the vertical point size of a font, where a point is about 1/72 of an inch. Typical sizes for text are 10-point and 12-point.

• Font effects refers to attributes such as underlining, strikeout, and color that can be applied to text in many applications.

The following terms are also used to describe fonts and typefaces:

• Spacing can be either fixed or proportional. In a fixed font, such as Courier, every character occupies the same amount of horizontal space, like typewritten characters. In a proportional font, such as Arial or Times New Roman, character width varies.

• Pitch refers to the amount of horizontal space used for each character of fixed-width fonts. This is often specified in characters-per-inch (CPI), where 10-pitch equals 12-point, 12-pitch equals 10-point, and 15-pitch equals 8-point type. (Some fonts use other equivalencies.)

• Serif and sans serif describe specific characteristics of a typeface. Serif fonts, such as Times New Roman or Courier, have projections that extend from the upper and lower strokes of the letters. Sans serif fonts, such as Arial and MS Sans Serif, do not have serifs.

• Slant refers to the angle of a font's characters, which can be italic or roman (no slant).

• Weight refers to the heaviness of the stroke for a specific font, such as Light, Regular, Book, Demi, Bold, Heavy, Black, and Extra Bold.

• Width refers to whether the standard typeface has been extended or compressed horizontally. The common variations are Condensed, Normal, or Expanded.

• X-height refers to the vertical height of lowercase characters, such as "a" and "c," and the lower portion of lowercase characters, such as "h" and "k."