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What is Typography?
Typography is the visual styling of type, or written words. Typeface is arranged to be appealing and to communicate data.
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What is a font?
Fonts are sets of characters in a typeface with specific styling and size, including letters, numbers, marks and special characters.
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What is a Font Family?
A font family is a font set with similar qualities in design.
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What is a Stroke?
A stroke is any straight or curved line that makes up a letter.
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What is a Stem?
A stem is the main straight, vertical stroke in a letter. Examples include the letters 'B' and 'V'.
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What is a Foot in a letter?
The foot is the part of the stem that rests on the baseline.
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What is the Tail in a letter?
The tail is the descending stroke in a letter. A tail is usually decorative. Examples include the letter 'q'.
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What is a Bowl?
The bowl is the curved line in a letter that closes the rounded portions.
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What is a Counter?
The counter is the fully or partially enclosed space in a letter created by a curved line, or bowl.
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What is the Spine?
The spine refers to only the letter 's'. It is the main curved stroke of a letter that can be either horizontal or vertical.
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What is the Terminal of a letter?
The terminal is a curved line that ends a letter without decorative feet or a serif.
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What is Uppercase?
Uppercase is the larger, capital letters of a typeface.
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What is Lowercase?
Lowercase is the small letters of a typeface.
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What are Small Caps?
Small caps are capital letters that are the same height as the lowercase, or x-height, of that typeface.
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What is Font Weight?
Font weight is the heaviness of a stroke of a font. Some common font weights include light, semibold and bold.
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What is Point Size?
Point size is a unit of measure for the size of text. There are about 72 points in one inch.
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What is Serif Typeface?
Serif typeface is a typeface with decorative feet, or lines, on the ends of letters.
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What is Sans Serif Typeface?
Sans serif typeface is a typeface without serifs, or decorative lines, on the ends of letters.
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What is Slab Serif?
Slab serif is a serif typeface with thick, square-shaped strokes. Slab serif is typically used in headlines and titles.
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What is Script?
Script is a typeface similar to handwritten cursive.
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What is Italics?
Italics is a font style that angles characters slightly to the right.
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What is a Baseline?
A baseline is the horizontal line where all letter sit, marking the lowest point of uppercase letters and most lowercase letters except descenders.
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What is a Midline?
Midline, also known as the 'mean line' or 'median' in typography, refers to the line at the top of lowercase letters where non-ascending letters stop.
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What is X-Height?
X-height is the maximum height of lowercase letters, or the distance from the baseline to midline. The x-height is typically measured by the height of the letter 'x' in each typeface.
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What is Cap Height?
Cap height is the distance from the baseline to the top height of uppercase or capital letters.
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What is the Ascender?
The ascender is the portion of a lowercase letter that extends above the x-height, such as letters 'b', 'd,' and 'h.'
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What is the Descender?
The descender is the portion of a lowercase letter that extends below the baseline, such as letters 'g,' 'j,' and 'p.'
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What is Tracking?
Tracking, also known as 'letter-spacing', is the even spacing of all characters in a word or sentence.
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What is Leading?
Leading, pronounced 'ledding', refers to the vertical space between lines of text. Adjusting the distance between baselines for legibility is also known as line-height or line spacing.
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What is Copy?
Body copy is the editorial text in a digital design, print publication or other medium.
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What is Lorem Ipsum?
Lorem Ipsum, also known as 'dummy copy', is text that resembles Latin and is used as a temporary placeholder in design to be replaced with real content.
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What is a Pull Quote?
A pull quote is a short phrase or excerpt from the body text that is emphasized or visually highlighted to add interest.
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What is an Orphan?
An orphan is a word or short line that appears alone at the end of a paragraph or the beginning of a column or page.
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What is a Widow?
A widow is the last word or shot line of a paragraph appearing separately on the following column or page, or beginning a new paragraph at the bottom of a column or page.
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What is text Alignment?
Alignment is the arranging of the position of all design elements to the same line. Common alignments includes left, right, centered or justified.
