TypesettingTypesetting is the composition of text by means of arranging physical type (or sort) in mechanical systems or glyphs in digital systems representing characters (letters and other symbols). Stored types are retrieved and ordered according to a language's orthography for visual display. Typesetting requires one or more fonts (which are widely but erroneously confused with and substituted for typefaces). One significant effect of typesetting was that authorship of works could be spotted more easily, making it difficult for copiers who have not gained permission.
Long sThe long s , also known as the medial s or initial s, is an archaic form of the lowercase letter . It replaced the single s, or one or both of the letters s in a "double s" sequence (e.g., "sinfulness" for "sinfulness" and "possess" or "possess" for "possess", but never *"possess"). The modern letterform is known as the "short", "terminal", or "round" s. In typography, it is known as a type of swash letter, commonly referred to as a "swash s".
HyphenThe hyphen is a punctuation mark used to join words and to separate syllables of a single word. The use of hyphens is called hyphenation. Son-in-law is an example of a hyphenated word. The hyphen is sometimes confused with dashes (en dash and em dash and others), which are longer, or with the minus sign , which is also longer and usually higher up to match the crossbar in the plus sign . As an orthographic concept, the hyphen is a single entity.
Letter caseLetter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (or more formally majuscule) and smaller lowercase (or more formally minuscule) in the written representation of certain languages. The writing systems that distinguish between the upper- and lowercase have two parallel sets of letters: each in the majuscule set has a counterpart in the minuscule set. Some counterpart letters have the same shape, and differ only in size (e.g. {C,c} or {S,s}), but for others the shapes are different (e.
TypefaceA typeface (or font family) is a design of letters, numbers and other symbols, to be used in printing or for electronic display. Most typefaces include variations in size (e.g., 24 point), weight (e.g., light, bold), slope (e.g., italic), width (e.g., condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font. There are thousands of different typefaces in existence, with new ones being developed constantly. The art and craft of designing typefaces is called type design.
Emphasis (typography)In typography, emphasis is the strengthening of words in a text with a font in a different style from the rest of the text, to highlight them. It is the equivalent of prosody stress in speech. The most common methods in Western typography fall under the general technique of emphasis through a change or modification of font: italics, boldface and . A means of emphasis that does not have much effect on blackness is the use of italics, where the text is written in a script style, or oblique, where the vertical orientation of each letter of the text is slanted to the left or right.
TildeThe tilde ("tIldeI,-di,-d@,_"tIld) or , is a grapheme with several uses. The name of the character came into English from Spanish, which in turn came from the Latin titulus, meaning "title" or "superscription". Its primary use is as a diacritic (accent) in combination with a base letter; but for historical reasons, it is also used in standalone form within a variety of contexts. The tilde was originally written over an omitted letter or several letters as a scribal abbreviation, or "mark of suspension" and "mark of contraction", shown as a straight line when used with capitals.
Latin scriptThe Latin script, also known as the Roman script, is an alphabetic writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae, in southern Italy (Magna Graecia). The Greek alphabet was adopted by the Etruscans, and subsequently their alphabet was adopted by the Romans. Several Latin-script alphabets exist, which differ in graphemes, collation and phonetic values from the classical Latin alphabet.
ÆÆ (lowercase: æ) is a character formed from the letters a and e, originally a ligature representing the Latin diphthong ae. It has been promoted to the status of a letter in some languages, including Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese. It was also used in Old Swedish before being changed to ä. The modern International Phonetic Alphabet uses it to represent the near-open front unrounded vowel (the sound represented by the 'a' in English words like cat). Diacritic variants include Ǣ/ǣ, Ǽ/ǽ, Æ̀/æ̀, Æ̂/æ̂ and Æ̃/æ̃.
Question markThe question mark (also known as interrogation point, query, or eroteme in journalism) is a punctuation mark that indicates an interrogative clause or phrase in many languages. In the fifth century, Syriac Bible manuscripts used question markers, according to a 2011 theory by manuscript specialist Chip Coakley: he believes the zagwa elaya ("upper pair"), a vertical double dot over a word at the start of a sentence, indicates that the sentence is a question.
ŒŒ (minuscule: œ) is a Latin alphabet grapheme, a ligature of o and e. In medieval and early modern Latin, it was used to represent the Greek diphthong οι and in a few non-Greek words, usages that continue in English and French. In French, it is also used in some non-learned words, representing then mid-front rounded vowel-sounds, rather than sounding the same as é or è, those being its traditional French values in the words borrowed from or via Latin.
SerifIn typography, a serif (ˈsɛrᵻf) is a small line or stroke regularly attached to the end of a larger stroke in a letter or symbol within a particular font or family of fonts. A typeface or "font family" making use of serifs is called a serif typeface (or serifed typeface), and a typeface that does not include them is sans-serif. Some typography sources refer to sans-serif typefaces as "grotesque" (in German, grotesk) or "Gothic", and serif typefaces as "roman".
UnicodeUnicode, formally The Unicode Standard, is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, which is maintained by the Unicode Consortium, defines as of the current version (15.0) 149,186 characters covering 161 modern and historic scripts, as well as symbols, thousands of emoji (including in colours), and non-visual control and formatting codes.
TypographyTypography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line-spacing (leading), and letter-spacing (tracking), as well as adjusting the space between pairs of letters (kerning). The term typography is also applied to the style, arrangement, and appearance of the letters, numbers, and symbols created by the process.
GlyphA glyph (ɡlɪf) is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A grapheme, or part of a grapheme (such as a diacritic), or sometimes several graphemes in combination (a composed glyph) can be represented by a glyph. In most languages written in any variety of the Latin alphabet except English, the use of diacritics to signify a sound mutation is common.
Digraph (orthography)A digraph or digram (from the δίς , "double" and γράφω , "to write") is a pair of characters used in the orthography of a language to write either a single phoneme (distinct sound), or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined. Some digraphs represent phonemes that cannot be represented with a single character in the writing system of a language, like the English sh in ship and fish. Other digraphs represent phonemes that can also be represented by single characters.
Number signThe symbol is known variously in English-speaking regions as the number sign, hash, or pound sign. The symbol has historically been used for a wide range of purposes including the designation of an ordinal number and as a ligatured abbreviation for pounds avoirdupois – having been derived from the now-rare . Since 2007, widespread usage of the symbol to introduce metadata tags on social media platforms has led to such tags being known as "hashtags", and from that, the symbol itself is sometimes called a hashtag.
Slash (punctuation)The slash is the oblique slanting line punctuation mark . Also known as a stroke, a solidus, a forward slash or several other historical or technical names including oblique and virgule. Once used to mark periods and commas, the slash is now used to represent division and fractions, exclusive 'or' and inclusive 'or', and as a date separator. A slash in the reverse direction is known as a backslash. Slashes may be found in early writing as a variant form of dashes, vertical strokes, etc.
CollationCollation is the assembly of written information into a standard order. Many systems of collation are based on numerical order or alphabetical order, or extensions and combinations thereof. Collation is a fundamental element of most office filing systems, library catalogs, and reference books. Collation differs from classification in that the classes themselves are not necessarily ordered. However, even if the order of the classes is irrelevant, the identifiers of the classes may be members of an ordered set, allowing a sorting algorithm to arrange the items by class.
TransliterationTransliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one script to another that involves swapping letters (thus trans- + liter-) in predictable ways, such as Greek → , Cyrillic → , Greek → the digraph , Armenian → or Latin → . For instance, for the Modern Greek term "Ελληνική Δημοκρατία", which is usually translated as "Hellenic Republic", the usual transliteration to Latin script is , and the name for Russia in Cyrillic script, "Россия", is usually transliterated as .
