What Are Fonts?

What Are Typefaces?
Typefaces are a created set of characters of a single size and style. Examples of well known typefaces include: Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, Times New Roman, etc. If you have ever written a paper for school/work you have probably used one of these.What Are Fonts?
Fonts are specific styles and sizes of a typeface. For example, Arial is a typeface, while a font would be Arial Black 18pts, a specific styling of that type.What does Sans-Serif and Serif mean?

Serif is a type of typeface that includes serifs. Serifs are the little endings on the end of a letter stroke. If you look at the character below you will notice that there are details at the end, those serifs are what define a serif font. Serif typefaces are primarily used for body text especially in print material as it is considered easier to read. Furthermore, Serif is deemed as a more professional font then San-Serif fonts.
Sans-Serif are typefaces which do not have serifs. These are used more often for headlines, headings and small sections of text. Sans-serifs are considered to be easier to read on computer screens

Typography is performed by typesetters, compositors, typographers, graphic designers, art directors, comic book artists, graffiti artists, and clerical workers. Until the Digital Age, typography was a specialized occupation. Digitization opened up typography to new generations of visual designers and lay users.

What Is Typography MeansSome online referal definitions are:-Typography is the art and technique of arranging type, type design, and modifying type glyphs. Type glyphs are created and modified using a variety of illustration techniques. The arrangement of type involves the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading (line spacing), adjusting the spaces between groups of letters (tracking) and adjusting the space between pairs of letters (kerning) wikipedia, (online)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typography

Typography is performed by typesetters, compositors, typographers, graphic designers, art directors, comic book artists, graffiti artists, and clerical workers. Until the Digital Age, typography was a specialized occupation. Digitization opened up typography to new generations of visual designers and lay users.Typography is the process of designing, arranging and modifying type. Arranging type involves a number of techniques:changing point size, width, leading, letter-spacing and kerning. Don’t worry if you do not know what these terms are, we will cover them shortly.
The study of typography involves understanding readability and legibility.  A lot of thought goes into choosing the correct techniques to apply to type as it has an effect on the reader. When you are driving down the highway and notice the road signs are all the same font, that’s for a reason.

Equipment needed

• pen & paper
• flatbed scanner
• font creation software: FontLab
• vector drawing software: Adobe Illustrator
• other software: Adobe Photoshop

1) Draw/sketch the letterforms
Use whatever drawing tool seems best for the mood of this font — pencil, charcoal, a hair dipped in ink, or a dismembered finger. Be as precise or wild as it needs. The less scaling and adjusting you have to do later on the computer, the better. So try to make the letters a consistent size, with a bit of space between each one. If you don’t have a design, be crazy… maybe that’s the design too. You may also choose to create your letters with software tools, and skip this first two steps.

2) Scan the letterforms
Scan your lettershapes into the computer at 300 dpi in grayscale mode. Perform any cleanup necessary. Use eraser tool with an efficient brush size. Lowering the white point in Image>Mode>Levels can remove smudges. Then save the file as a .TIFF

3) Convert bitmap art into vector art
There are a number of different software tools can convert bitmap or raster images like TIFFs into vector artwork. Adobe Illustrator CS2 contains a new feature called Live Trace. Check here for other plugins and options. Convert your TIFF bitmap into an EPS that Illustrator can read as vector shapes. (Though more time consuming, you may choose to trace the letterforms using the drawing tools of Illustrator or FreeHand.)

4) Clean up the vector shapes
Open the file in Illustrator. Make any adjustments. Separate and scale the letterforms. For efficient transfer to the font software, scale the characters to a common height and align in horizontal in groups. Use guides for assistance. Then move or cleanup any stray points. You can completely change anything about your letter shapes at this stage. (You could also use FreeHand or CorelDraw for editing vector shapes.)

5) Cut & paste the letterforms into font software
In FontLab, select File>New Font then check “do not rescale EPS” in Preferences/General. In Illustrator preferences, change the units to points (1 point equals 1 unit in FontLab) and change the copy format to AICB (turn off PDF). Make a box 1000×500 ponts in Illustrator, add baseline, x-height lines and any other guidelines you might want. Fill or stroke everything (FontLab won’t import paths with no fill/no line). Open a glyph window in FontLab and paste (into the Outline layer). (You can also export letter shapes as EPS files and use Glyph>Import from EPS option in FontLab.)

6) Clean up the glyphs
FontLab is a powerful, professional font editing program, and much can be done to the glyphs within the software. Experiment with settings under Tools>Outlines and with the points themselves. Check Connections and Optimize under the same Tools menu. Move or cleanup any stray points. Scale the letterforms with Window>Transformation Panel. You can still completely change anything about your letter shapes.

7) Save the font
Give the font a name in File>Font Info, then save it under File>Save. (This saves a .vfb font metrics file. After the next step, you may be ready to generate font files.)

Space and kern the font
There is plenty of documentation with FontLab which needn’t be paraphrased here, but these menu items will help create basic spacing for a typeface. (Creating hundreds of kerning pairs is often necessary for a precise professional typeface.)
Tools>Kerning Assistance…
Tools>Metric Assistance…
Window>Preview panel

http://www.foamtrain.com/howto.html

Before we get into specifics, we need to define a few descriptive terms to help you see some of the differences between the categories. The terms are a little esoteric, but I think you will find them helpful to categorize things in your own mind. They will also help when buying fonts to make good choices.

1. Stems: The Vertical Strokes In Letters Like H, K, L, R And So On.
2. Bowls: The Rounded Parts Of Letters Like B, D, G, O, P, And Even C And S, According To Some.
3. Crossbars: The Horizontal Strokes On A, H, E, And So On.
4. Head And Foot Serifs: The Serifs At The Top And Bottom Of A Stem As In H, L, K, And D.
5. Adnate Or Bracketed Serifs:Serifs That Flow Smoothly (Often Gracefully) Out Of The Stems.
6. Abrupt Serifs: Cross Strokes At The End Of Stems With No Bracketing.
7. Terminals: The Endings Of The Curved Portions Of Letters Like A, C, R, C, G, And So On.
8. Lachrymal: Terminals That Are Tear-Drop Shaped.
9. Stroke: The Lines That Make Up The Characters From The Old Assumption That Letters Are Calligraphic And Drawn With Separate Strokes Of A Pen Or Brush.
10. Modulated Stroke: A Stroke That Varies In Width As It Proceeds Around The Letter Form.
11. Axis: The Angle The Pen Was Held At To Produce The Modulated Stroke Of Calligraphers.
12. Humanist Axis: The Axis For Normal Right-Handed Calligraphic Penmanship.
13. Contrast: How Much The Stroke Is Modulated.
14. Aperture: The Openings Of Curves On Letters Like A, C, E, S, And So On.
15. Slope: How Far Italic And Oblique Letters Slant In Degrees.

There are more, but this will be enough for our purposes. As you can see, type gets very technical. The differences will seem insignificant to you now, as you start. But they are really very important. Aperture, for example, tends to control the friendliness and readability. The axis changes from humanist to mechanical vertical strongly influence our reaction to the warmness or coolness of a font. But we’ll discuss these things as we go, giving you examples so you can see the differences.

source from:http://www.hackberry-fonts.com/type_terms.html