Using fonts and varying the appearance of text
Introduction to fonts and typefaces
A font is a collection of characters (letters, digits and
punctuation symbols) of a particular design and size.
The typeface of a font is the design style of the charac-
ters. The typeface lends a font its distinctive appear-
ance. There are hundreds of different typefaces in
existence. Commonly-used typefaces include Times,
Palatino, Helvetica, Univers and Courier. Some exam-
ples of different typefaces are shown below.
Courier
Palatino
Bookman
Univers
Helvetica
Some typefaces, for example Times and Palatino, have
small curly hooks on the ends of the lines that form the
characters. These hooks are known as seriLfs and make
body text more readable by leading the eye on from one
letter to the next. Other typefaces, for example Univers
and Helvetica, do not have these hooks and are referred
to as sans sery(without serr typefaces. Characters in
these typefaces stand out on their own. Generally fonts
with seriftypefaces are used for body text and sans serif
typefaces are used for headings and captions
Fonts are either monospaced (fixed) or proportionally-
spaced. Font spacing is inherent in the typeface. Of the
typefaces shown above, Courier is monospaced, and the
rest are proportionally-spaced.
The characters in a monospaced font all have equal
width and occupy an equal amount of space on a line.
The characters of a proportionally-spaced font take up
varying amounts of space depending on each individual
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