Phinney on Fonts

Category: Terminology

  • About .notdef: the symbol (not emoji!) that is often an “X” inside a tall rectangle

    I have fielded many versions of this question: “What does the emoji with an X in a large rectangle mean?” or “When texting, what is the meaning of the symbol with an “X” inside a tall rectangle?”

    That it is an X-​in-​a-​tall-​rectangle is just the most common rendition, although not the only possible one, for the “.notdef”. A variety of font-​specific notdefs are shown above.

    It is not an emoji, but you can get it instead of an emoji or other unusual character. A notdef (undefined glyph) is what gets displayed when a character is specified in text, but your current font does not support that character. Most commonly it happens with a newer emoji, but it could be in an unusual language or a new currency symbol, or… well, something unusual.

    This problem is not unique to texting, but applies to all kinds of displays of text on all devices, whenever the needed character is not available in the available font(s).It is an indicator for a “missing character,” which stands in for an emoji or any other character that your device or current font doesn’t have a glyph to display it with. This makes it a very special symbol.

    (A particularly hefty notdef, that I designed for one of my typefaces. The font is quite bold, so I made the outer box of the notdef quite bold to match. How font-​specific should a notdef be? As I get older and hopefully wiser, I gravitate towards what seems to be a near-​concensus view that it should contrast with the font, so users realize something is wrong. That means matching weight is actually a bad idea. Oops.)

    This is more common when you are receiving rather than sending a text, since you are unlikely to enter a character that you don’t see correctly. But it can happen when you try to view a web page, or copy text from a source and paste it somewhere that it comes out in a different font.

    Often there is some kind of font fallback available; your phone (or computer) tries to display unusual characters and emoji in some other font, that supports those characters. That is why in some situations you can see a name and some unusual character in the name is displayed in a different font than the rest of the name. But phones have limited storage space, and whether it is a phone or computer, there are over 150,000 characters defined in Unicode, with more added every year.

    So when your phone (or web browser or computer) runs out of ideas on how to display a character? You get a notdef.

    If you copy and paste a notdef on your computer or into a text or email you are sending, you will probably be copying some specific emoji or obscure character. That means that some other person who receives that (or later views the same file on their computer) may well see something else entirely!

    Even if they do see a notdef, it may look different, depending on the font they see it in. Here are the most common/​standard approaches to the notdef, as defined in the OpenType specification.

    The thinner box creates a very different appearance compared to the X-​in-​a-​box approach, doesn’t it? Note that these are general approaches, not precise glyph outlines that a font maker would use directly.

    The plain rectangular box is the style of notdef that was common in PostScript Type 1 fonts, back in the 1980s–90s. But it has fallen out of favor. I believe the main reason for this is that as a shape it is not as distinctive, and hence more easily missed by someone looking over some text.

    That plain box is the origin of the slang term “tofu” for the notdef, over some notional idea that it resembled a piece of tofu. I originally thought Google staff invented this slang, as the first time I remembered seeing it was in publicity for Google’s “Noto” universal font set (“Noto” being short for “no tofu”!). But my font colleague Denis Moyogo Jacquerye pointed to this thread on the Unicode mailing list in spring 2009, and says it was one of a number of references around that time. John Hudson seconds encountering the “tofu” term in Unicode circles, so I may have been hasty in assuming it was a Google invention. 

    The question-​mark-​in-​a-​box is used in many of Microsoft’s fonts, such as Calibri. Note how the question mark inside the notdef is in the style of the font—it isn’t just a generic one. This style was invented by John Hudson during the development of Calibri and the other so-​called “ClearType fonts,” that shipped in January 2007.

    “The ART [Advanced Reading Technologies] group had used a spiral .notdef in Palatino Linotype, but it had caused confusion because it wasn’t recognised by users as a missing glyph indicator. For the C* fonts, I suggested that a) a box of some kind was necessary, and b) a question mark would indicate uncertainty: there’s a character here, but we don’t know how to display it.”

    John Hudson on Mastodon, 17 Dec 2024

    A plain rectangular box was the style of notdef that was common in PostScript Type 1 fonts, back in the 1980s–90s. But it has fallen out of favor. I believe the main reason for this is that as a shape it is not as distinctive, and hence more easily missed by someone looking over some text and trying to spot errors and glitches. When I was at Adobe, we went from the empty box to the X-​in-​a-​box style as part of our transition from PostScript Type 1 to OpenType, from 1999–2003.

    HOW DO I GET THE RIGHT CHARACTER INSTEAD?

    Updating to the latest OS for your phone (or computer) usually also updates your Unicode and emoji support and system fonts. If the problem is in an app that has its own Unicode/​emoji/​fonts, then updating that app may help.

    Many apps and OSes will use “fallback fonts” when the current font does not support a needed character. In that case, the above advice is good: you need better support from some core system font.

    (This was originally written for Quora, but as Quora continues to turn to garbage, one of my answers on this, despite having the most upvotes, was made invisible by the system for unclear reasons. So I have merged my answers to two similar questions into one, and posted it here.)

  • Without serifs: a sans by any other name

    Recently, a question by Cynthia Batty on the ATypI mailing list led me to do a quick survey on what we call typefaces without serifs. Click here to take survey.

    Here are the results of my little survey. There have been over 300 responses. It’s certainly not a random sample, mostly people deeply involved with typography in some way. Interestingly, the results didn’t really vary by expertise level. (The order of the possible answers was randomly varied so as not to influence the answers, btw.)

    • “sans serif” 68%
    • “sans-​serif” 27%
    • “sanserif” 2%
    • other 3%

    The most common comments under “other” were that it should be “sans serif” as a noun and “sans-​serif” as an adjective (for example, “a sans-​serif typeface”). Certainly if the noun form is “sans serif” then standard English usage would dictate that the compound adjective would be hyphenated.

    Another common response was that “sans” is an acceptable informal shorthand for “sans serif.”

    Finally, it seems that despite a bit of solid support in the UK for “sanserif,” that spelling is neither particularly widely used nor accepted. The Oxford English Dictionary accepts it and dates it back to 1830, and the Oxford University Press, Robert Bringhurst (The Elements of Typographic Style) and eminent professors James Mosley and Michael Twyman all use it, as does typographer and typography author Robin Kinross. I must confess to not much liking “sanserif” myself.

    [Edited to correct spelling of “Mosley” and add a little more detail on “sanserif,” and again to add Bringhurst the to list of “sanserif” supporters.]

  • Point Size and the Em Square: Not What People Think

    It’s easy enough to determine that a point is 1/​72 of an inch, and used to be about 1/72.27 in the days before digital type. But the challenging question is, when you look at printed type on a page, what part of a 12-​point font is 12 points high? The short answer is “none.” Seriously. For metal type it’s the “body” which is not something you see in print, and for digital type it’s the “em,” which is completely virtual.

    Font Size Measurement Confusion

    The background to this is long and complicated, so I hope you’ll forgive me if I first explain how this is the question that just refuses to die, and the confusion it can cause… in painful detail.

    • In current litigation, Microsoft is contesting Apple’s trademark of the term “App Store.” In the latest salvo, Microsoft says Apple’s most recent brief in the case is too many pages, and in too small a font size. Interestingly, they say how many pages it is over by, but they don’t actually mention the exact font size. I am not convinced this is because of the measurement issues described elsewhere in this blog post, as one can easily check the font size in Acrobat (except for docs that are scanned in to create a PDF). The font size is supposed to be at least 11 point, and at a cursory examination it appears to be… 10.98 pt (according to the Acrobat Touch-​Up text tool, anyway—I didn’t spelunk the PDF the way I would have if I were advising one side or the other). What happened? I can’t be sure, but I will note that there are some workflows that can cause this kind of minute shrinkage inadvertently. For example, when a PDF is printed, and Acrobat “helpfully” tries to make sure the document’s margins fit within the printable area on the currently targeted output device. Perhaps that (or something similar) happened here. It seems unlikely the person making the doc did it on purpose, since they did not fit within the page limit anyway, and many applications do not even allow people to adjust type size in increments that small.
    • The other day I looked at a bunch of lesson slides from a university-​level typography course. One of them claimed that the distance from the baseline (bottom of a letter such as H) to the cap height (top of a letter such as H) was the point size. I wish that were true, as it would be much simpler than the reality. On average, the cap height is about 70% of the point size.
    • When Apple first released the Zapfino script font, they sized it relative to the largest and swashiest capitals in the font. But this made the size of the lowercase letters look very small indeed, relative to most other fonts. Around 2002, they revised it for Mac OS 10.2, so that for any given point size, it was 2.5× as large. This was mostly a marketing/​usability decision; neither version is more “correct” from a technical point of view.
    • In a closely related issue, the “em” is a typographic measurement equal to the current point size (usually an “em square” or “em quad” in two dimensions), but since it relates to point size, it too has no precise measurement relationship to anything one sees in print or on screen. I have sometimes had difficulty convincing non-​typographers of this fact, notably for the relevant article on Wikipedia.
    • Some years ago, I was contacted by the San Diego District Attorney’s office. A snail-​mail spam-​scammer was mass mailing a document that included a legal disclaimer, which the scammer was trying to make as unobtrusive as possible. The legal disclaimer was required by law to be in 12 point type. The font turned out to be a free version of Empire, with its ultra-​narrow and super-​thin caps and small caps. I downloaded it and as best as I could determine from a physical print-​out comparison, it had indeed been printed at 12 points. Of course (for reasons described more below), one could easily have modified in the reverse of the change Apple did with Zapfino, so that 12 point type would be half as big when printed. But the real problem was that Empire is an ultracondensed sans serif, rather like what one often sees in movie poster credits, and is pretty well unreadable at 12 points. If the objective was to get people to not notice the legally-​required disclaimer, the company that wrote the letters did a great job, and seemed to have done so within the law as far as point size was considered. I told the DA’s office I was sorry, but I didn’t think I had anything that could help them.
    • A couple of months ago, I was contacted by New York City lawyer Brad Richter about pretty much the same issue. Recently passed legislation around Power of Attorney in New York state requires that forms granting power of attorney be printed in 12 point type. Brad had done enough reading to strongly suspect the truth: point size doesn’t relate to anything specific in size of printed letters! Yes, given a specific font, the size of 12 point text in print is related to the font data. But 12 point in one font can be bigger or smaller than 12 point in another. If the objective was to provide useful guidance to people using typical fonts, then I’d say the law is just fine. But if we take that the objective is, as Brad described it to me, to legislate the “literal size of text – a minimum physical printed size so that the elderly can easily read the form,” then the law is useless. (Below I propose some wording that might come closer to achieving the desired effect.)

    Historical Background

    Back in the days of metal type, the answer was simple, even if it didn’t relate to anything one saw in the printed output. The point size of the type was simply the height of the metal body the type was cast on. Additional line spacing was added by means of thin strips of lead between the lines, hence the term “leading” (pronounced “ledding”) for line spacing.

    Metal type, showing point size

    Above is shown a piece of traditional metal type (photo courtesy Daniel Ullrich, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Share-​Alike 3.0). The added red bracket shows the body height, which one would measure to determine the type size.

    In metal type, without leading, the distance from the baseline of one line to the next would be the same as the point size. However as you can see in the example, once the metal type was printed, there was no direct means of knowing what the original point size had been, unless one also knows either the original typeface or the amount of leading used with some certainty.

    Today’s Answer & Implications

    In digital type, the font’s letters are drawn on a grid, where an arbitrary number of units (often 1000 or 2048) are set to equal the “em” which is then scaled to the current point size for output. So to get 12 point type in print, with a 2048-​unit em, that digital space is scaled so that the 2048 units in the design space are equal to 12 points. As Karsten Luëcke put it in a recent discussion on Typophile:

    In digital type, the EM does not refer to a “real” box. You better consider the EM as a yardstick – an abstract letter-​height yardstick which establishes a link between micro and macro level, between font-​internal unit system and font-​external unit system: The font-​internal unit system is defined via UPM, i.e. as the number of units per EM. It is the letter-​design grid or resolution. The font-​external unit system may be typographic point, millimeter, pixel, etc. And this abstract EM serves to project the font-​internal unit system onto the font-​external unit system.

    An example. You have a font with 2048 units per EM, internally, which is to be projected on 12 pt type size, externally. So 12 pts = 2048 M-​units or 1 M-​unit = 12/​2048 pt.

    So to image the font at 12 point, one scales the abstract EM to equal 12 points.

    The catch for purposes of measurement and standardization is that while there are some restrictions on how large one can draw letters in the design space, there is no necessary and required relationship between the size of the letters and the em. On average, with Latin-​based languages such as English, the “cap height” of capital letters is about 70% of the point size, and the “x-​height” of lower-​case letters is about 70% of the cap height, or about half the point size. But (and I cannot stress this enough), those are only averages, and there is no technical requirement whatsoever that one be close to those averages. Indeed, x-​height relative to cap height is one of the ways typographers describe typefaces (“high x-​height” vs “low x-height”).

    [UPDATE : I did some research for a client, and verified that as expected, cap size varies substantially between different fonts. In my sample, cap size was most usually 62%-78% of the em square, averaging right around 67-​70%. Or to put it another way, if you take an “average” font printed at a given point size, other fonts at the same point size will commonly have capitals as much as 10% smaller or 10% larger than the capitals from the average font. At the extreme you can find fonts “in the wild” with caps barely over half the average size! (I expect you could also find fonts with caps close to half again the average size, but I wasn’t looking so hard in that direction.)]

    Moreover, the Zapfino example given earlier shows how a given font could be at a radically different size relative to the point size and still be a legitimate font. Indeed, anyone knowledgeable in modifying fonts could in a matter of minutes, take almost any font and create a modified version, with the only visible difference being that text at a given point size is only a fraction of the size.

    What About the Web?

    The web can use points, but just defines them in terms of pixels. It has inherited the Windows definition of that ratio, so on the web by default 1 pt = 4/​3 pixels, so 12 pt = 16 pixels (but see below).

    It used to be that Mac browsers used the Mac relationship of points to pixels, which was one-​to-​one, but that has been abandoned just a few years ago. so at least points vs screen pixels are now consistent across platforms, though how big a point is on screen (or a nominal browser pixel for that matter) depends on your screen resolution, what zoom level your browser happens to be set to at the moment, and (on Windows) whether you have set something other than the default screen resolution of 96dpi.

    But the relationship between pixels and points is broken in some browsers on Windows (such as Internet Explorer 7 and earlier) when the user has a non-​standard resolution set. For example, if you actively tell Windows your screen resolution is 120 dpi instead of 96 dpi, that means that point sizes get multiplied by 5/​4, but sizes in pixels do not. So at 120 dpi, a font set to 9 pt will instead show up at 15 px, but a font set to 12 px will still be 12 px, and now smaller. Arguably this is a reason never to do font sizes in px. (Bitmapped grapics generally are not scaled by the 5/​4 ratio in browsers, but they are in other apps such as Word or the usual graphics previewing programs.)

    This may get even less standard in the future, as CSS 3 is threatening to make pixels a truly imaginary thing, always equal to 4/​3 the point size. This would cause pixels to scale into virtual pixels when non-​standard resolutions are set.

    Of course, some users (like me) are constantly changing the zoom level in their browsers, which also plays hob with any notion of fixed sizes for points, though at least relative sizes are maintained by browser zoom.

    Things get kinda weird on the web, in another regard. CSS can use “ems” as a measurement unit. Okay, that makes sense, right? I mean, why not set an indent or margin in ems? No problem. Where it gets weird is that you can set the type size in ems. Now, logically based on the “normal” definition of the em, this makes no sense, because the size of an em is always the same as the type size, so the size of the type is always one em. But CSS allows you to break that assumption by setting an em to some specific number of points or pixels, and then setting the type size to some multiple of that. It gets even weirder, actually, because you don’t need to define the em in the first place. If you don’t define it, the standard browser assumption is that one em = 16 pixels (Firefox and possibly Chrome), or 12 points (Internet Explorer). The difference between IE and the rest doesn’t matter with default Windows resolutions, but it gets interesting at non-​standard Windows resolutions because IE then scales the default em, while Firefox does not…. Ouch.

    [Note: edited and expanded this section several times on 21 March 2011 to better reflect system scaling setting issues. Thanks to Beat Stamm for pointing out the omission and helping me with details I hadn’t yet encountered.]

    How to Legislate Type Size Today?

    First, a disclaimer: One can implement reasonable precautions, but it’s not possible to stop determined people with sufficient knowledge of fonts and typography from creating customized fonts, which can in turn be used to create either illegible documents, or disclaimers that most people would never read. To even attempt to cover all possibiities would probably yield many pages of added law, which frankly somebody like me could probably still find a loophole in with a moderate investment of time and thought. What reasonably can be done, however, is to make the laws tight enough that it would take significantly more expertise, creativity and effort to work around them than is currently the case.

    So what variables does the law need to control when it wants to legislate a minimum size and legibility?

    • Instead of (or even in addition to) declaring a minimum point size, one could declare both a minimum cap height (defining that as the height of the smallest of the capital letters A-​Z), and a minimum x-​height (defining that as the height of the smallest of the lowercase letters a-​z), both in physical units. For example, one could require a cap height of at least 7 points and an x-​height of at least 5 points, which would be met by 12 point type in most everyday text typefaces.
    • As evidenced by the case described above from San Diego, adequate width also needs to be legislated. You don’t have to be a font geek to go out and license an ultracondensed font. One way of avoiding this would be to say that the total advance width of the letters a-​z and A-​Z, at the chosen font and size, meet some minimum. Times set at 12 pts clocks in at roughly 208 pts for A-​Z and 143 pts for a-​z. After checking many other fonts, I believe one could go with minimums of perhaps 162 pts (2.25”) wide for A-​Z and 120 pts (1 2/​3”) for a-​z as minimums.
    • I probably ought to add something on stroke thickness as well. However, given that stroke thickness varies within a font, and differs between horizontal and vertical strokes as well, the best way to cover this is not obvious. The desire would be to avoid extra light (or ultra bold) fonts. I wouldn’t feel too sad if it also outlawed typefaces such as Bodoni for legal documents, due to their very thin horizontals. Hmmm.

    Most common system fonts a reasonable person would think of using would mee these requirements, including Times/​Times New Roman, Arial, Helvetica, Courier/​Courier New, Verdana, Trebuchet, Georgia, Calibri, Consolas, Constantia, and Corbel.

    Of course, I’ve only addressed the font size part of the equation. There are many other components to legibility of text in print, such as line spacing, letter and word spacing, line length, and the color of the text and the paper.

    [EDITED various times to clarify minor points and improve wording. Most recently to correct that Zapfino was rescaled by 2.5x, not 4x, and replace a dead link.]

    ADDENDUM 16 August 2012:

    This stuff just doesn’t go away! A recent decision of the Michigan Supreme Court hinged on exactly this issue. The underlying subject matter was the hottest state political issue of recent years, an attempt to put in place a ballot measure that would in effect stop the ongoing removals of collective bargaining rights for folks doing business with cities. Here’s the Detroit Free Press about the case, and the actual court decision (including concurring and dissenting opinions).

  • It’s not a “screen font” any more

    Funny, the other day I had just finished a first pass at reviewing and revising the Extensis document on “Best Practices for Font Management in Mac OS X,” when a non-​Extensis colleague asked me something about PostScript Type 1 fonts: whether Windows .pfm and .pfb files were pretty much equivalent to Mac screen and printer font files.

    What was funny to me was that only half an hour earlier, I had just been adjusting the language about “screen fonts” and “printer fonts” in the Extensis doc.

    Anyway, here’s what I said:

    First, on *both* Mac and Windows, the phrases “printer font” and “screen font” make no sense any more when referring to the pieces of a Type 1 font. The last time those phrases made sense was at the beginning of the 1990s, before everyone started using ATM, which scaled the outline font (then called a “printer font”) for display on screen. This function has been long since taken over by the Mac and Windows operating systems around 1999-2000.

    Heck, Mac OS X isn’t even capable of using the bitmaps from the font suitcase for screen display at all, so it really isn’t a screen font any more.

    So, the “screen font” isn’t used on screen, and the “printer font” is used both on screen and on printers.

    Which is why I prefer to use the terms “font suitcase” and “outline font.”

    The font suitcase for a Type 1 font contains kerning information, which is useful, and bitmaps, which are required, but not actually used anywhere any more… it’s just that you need at least one bitmap size per font. BTW, one font suitcase can contain bitmaps for multiple outline fonts.

    The outline font is what it sounds like, the actual scalable outlines of all the glyphs in the font, as well as some platform-​independent info such as the PostScript FontName, FullName, yadda yadda.

    Oddly, both the suitcase and the outline font contain advance widths—the amount of space allotted for each glyph, including white space on either side of it.

    Finally, to answer my colleague’s question? Yes, the Windows .pfm and .pfb files are pretty much equivalent to the Mac font suitcase and the outline font (exactly equivalent in the case of the outline font and the .pfb). The .pfm file doesn’t have bitmaps, but it has other platform-​specific info, like the font suitcase.

    Of course, font suitcases can also be containers for Mac TrueType fonts, but that’s another story….

    [updated 27 Apr 2009 to clarify OS X not using bitmaps at all]

  • Font terms survey results

    I had 315 respondents before I closed off my survey on font terms. In general, the results were along the same lines I would have quessed, but less strong/​clear in many areas, and there were a couple of surprises.

    (On a side note, I am currently recovering from jaw surgery this past Monday. The surgeon cut through my jaw in three places, and also removed three wisdom teeth. So I’m a wee bit sore….)

    SUMMARY

    There is no consensus, but the overall opinion is that in today’s world of digital typography “a typeface” means the general design, including all its styles, regardless of how it’s instantiated, while “a font” means a single style of a typeface, such as Myriad bold condensed italic, in a specific file format.

    This is the same usage I prefer, but I’ll point out that there are some smart people who are prominent typographers who disagree. However, they’re in the minority, even among type industry professionals (which I will sometimes refer to as just “industry” in the results).

    There doesn’t seem to be any single preferred terminology for indicating a “superfamily,” which might contain related typefaces, such as Stone Serif and Stone Sans.

    The most popular term for a family of only up to four linked font styles, including bold and italic, seems to be simply “family,” to my surprise.

    The painful details below are probably only of interest to hard-​core font geeks, and while writing it up I wondered if I was perhaps getting a little too detailed….

    ANALYSIS

    I used features of SurveyMonkey to do such things as randomize the order in which different answer options were shown from one user to the next, to avoid any systematic bias due to presentation order.

    I analyzed the differences between groups looking at both font expertise and geography (questions 8 and 9). Geography rarely made a significant difference in results, but level of font expertise often did.

    (Sorry this analysis has taken so long, I’ve been remarkably busy with other things lately, such as being diagnosed with diabetes and getting a new job. I expect to remain pretty busy for the next couple of months, so my blog posts may be few for a while.)

    SEE FOR YOURSELF

    You can see the survey results yourself, as aggregate results in simple charts on SurveyMonkey.

    You can also look at these PDFs I made of the results. Sorry about the lousy page breaks in them, but they retain the formatting of the SurveyMonkey HTML version, and show the various filters I applied:

    In general, I didn’t find much interesting difference by geography, and the differences by expertise seemed to be on a fairly linear scale. That is to say, the more “advanced users” were always in between the industry professionals and the regular graphic designers in their take on any given issue. I was most interested in the opinion of industry pros, but if this differed a lot from more common usage, that was interesting, too.

    ANALYSIS

    I report below on each question, and commenting when some particular sub-group(s) answered that question significantly differently than the average. I analyzed results by level of font expertise, and by geography.

    Question 1

    Q1. What are the differences between a “font” and a “typeface”? (You can check ALL that apply)

    • 57% say “a typeface embodies more than one style (e.g. bold and italic) while a font is a single style (e.g. bold condensed italic)”
    • 55% say “a typeface is the abstract design; a font is a computer file instantiating a typeface in a specific format”
    • 11% say for “other” and made comments
    • 9.5% say “there is no difference, they are synonyms”

    With increasing expertise, people were much more likely to pick the “abstract design” option and somewhat less likely to go for “more than one style.” Type industry professionals went 73%/48% on these, while average users went 46%/63%, differences of 27% and 15%, respectively.

    Given the industry expert responses on question 2, I think one key issue here was that a typeface can have more than one style, but doesn’t necessarily. The other key thing is that there is much more consensus around the definition of “font” than the definition of “typeface.”

    Question 2

    Q2. When talking about scalable digital fonts, what constitutes “a font” in your mind?

    • 60% went for “One font is a single style of a
      typeface, in a given font format. So Arial Bold Italic is one font and Arial Italic is another. (Point size doesn’t matter.)” That went up to 85% for font industry professionals.
    • 20% went for “One font includes a base style plus any linked styles (bold, italic, bold italic) but no more than that. Arial is one font (including bold and italic), Arial Narrow is a second (including bold and italic), and Arial Black is a third.” Only 5% of industry professionals said this.
    • 8% say “one font includes all the different possible styles (condensed, extended, bold, italic)” (4% of industry professionals)
    • 8% wanted the extra specificity of size being included, the traditional definition from metal type: “One font is a given style at a specific size, just like in metal type. 10 point Arial Bold Italic is one font, and 12 point Arial Bold Italic is a different font.” Interestingly, only 4% of industry pros picked this.
    • 2% each went for “other” or “don’t know /​ not sure”

    Question 3

    Q3. Which of the following elements is part of the definition of “a single typeface” in your mind? Check ALL that apply.

    • 68% say “It is a family of one or more styles (including bold and italic)” (64% of industry pros)
    • 54% say “It is the design, regardless of how it’s instantiated” (62% of industry)
    • 54% say “It can include variants by optical size (such as display as well as regular)”
    • 52.5% say “It can include variants by width (such as condensed and extended)” (48% of industry)
    • 23% say “A typeface can include major style variants such as serif/​sans/​slab/​monospaced” (17% of industry)
    • 6% say “It includes no more styles than four, which are style-​linked (regular, italic, bold, bold italic)”

    Question 4

    Q4. How appropriate would you say each of the following terms is for meaning a single face/​style of a font family in a given format, such as Helvetica Bold Condensed Italic in OpenType CFF?

    Available responses ranged from “Absolutely Not” (1) to “Fits Perfectly” (6). So for each term, one can give the average rating on this 1-​6 scale, as well as percentages who gave each specific rating.

    • “Font” was the highest rated at 4.4 on average, with 36% saying it “fits perfectly.” This dominance was greater with industry pros, at 4.7 and 45%.
    • “Style” was rated 4.2 on average, with 24% saying it “fits perfectly” (just as many said it was a “very good” or “good” option). It tied with “variant” for having the fewest people hating it at 4%.
    • “Variant” was rated 3.9 on average, with 20% saying it “fits perfectly” (27% said it was a “good” option)
    • “Weight” was rated 3.8 on average, with 18% saying it “fits perfectly” (20% said it was a “good” option). Industry gave this a 3.5 on average
    • “Face” was rated 3.3 on average, with 16% saying it “fits perfectly” (and 23% saying “maybe”). Industry gave it a 3.1.

    Question 5

    Q5. How appropriate would you say each of the following terms is for use in describing a style-​linked group of up to four fonts (regular, italic, bold, bold italic)?

    Same response options as above, yielding the same 6-​point scale equivalent.

    • “Family” came out on top with a 4.4 average, which surprised me. I’ve always thought the term better suited to a broader group, perhaps a synonym for “typeface.” But I may need to broaden my thinking.
    • “Typeface” got 3.8 on average for this (3.4 from industry), which also surprised me because it was higher than I expected. Seems to me that industry agrees that “typeface” is broader than this, but too many people think of typefaces as only having four members.
    • “Style-​linked Family” got 3.3 on average (but 3.7 from industry). I have previously gone with “style-​linked group” but I think I’ll adopt this instead. It’s the most popular term which is still unambiguous.
    • “Style-​linked Group” got 3.0 on average. This is the term I have previously used.
    • “Styling Group,” “Styling Family” and “Font” all got 2.7 on average, which is below the midpoint (and even lower from industry, with 2.5, 2.3 and 1.9, respectively). Adam Twardoch recently invented “styling group” to be his preferred term for FontLab tutorials, which is why I put it in the survey. I don’t think I would suggest sticking with it, though.

    Question 6

    Q6. How appropriate is each of the following terms for describing a typeface family with an arbitrary number of styles? For example, they could vary in weight, width, slope, optical size, and possibly other minor stylistic ways.

    Same response options as above, yielding the same 6-​point scale equivalent.

    • “Font Family” got a 4.4. I have long considered this a synonym for “typeface,” and may start using it more.
    • “Extended Font Family” got a 4.2.
    • “Typeface” got a 4.1.
    • “Font” got 2.25 (the surprising part for me was that 4% of respondents thought it “fits perfectly”!)

    Question 7

    Q7. What’s the best term for describing a set of related fonts/​typefaces/​etcetera that differ in major design characteristics? For example, there might be a serif, a sans serif, a monospaced semi-​sans, and a slab serif version, each in turn comprising a full type family (or whatever one calls them) of its own. You construct a term by combining an adjective (options across the top) with a noun (options down the left side). This creates combined terms such as “type series” and “font suite.” Please check ONLY ONE BOX for this question, unless you feel there are two or more equally good first choices.

    i sort of threw this question in to attempt to explore the question, and maybe narrow the range of reasonable options a bit.

    “Collection,” “Extended Family,” and “Suite” were the most popular main terms, with optionally sticking in “Typeface” as in “Typeface Collection,” “Extended Typeface Family” and “Typeface Suite.”

    Personally I prefer “Type” as an adjective if one is to be used at all, but that was only popular in conjunction with second-​tier popularity terms such as “Type System” and “Type Series.” (The other second-​tier term was “Super-​family” which was most popular with no qualifier at all, or with “Typeface.”)

    I don’t really get why anybody would want to put “Typeface” and “Family” in the same term. It seems redundant to me.

    Other terms ranked much lower, including “Type Series,” “Typeface Meta-​family,” “Clan” and “Uber-​family.”

    Question 8

    Q8. How deeply involved are you with fonts and typography?

    • 22.5% Very Deeply (examples: type designer; font production, font sales or support)
    • 43% Deeply (examples: typographer, software developer who works closely with fonts, graphic/​web designer who is “into” fonts)
    • 30% Moderately (examples: average graphic designer or web designer)
    • 4% Average (example: just use fonts in Microsoft Office)

    Q9. Where are you from, and where do you live?

    (Update: I deleted the chart version of this, because SurveyMonkey really made a mess of what it did with percentages. But the results are….)

    Mostly educated in:

    • 59% USA/​Canada
    • 30% Western Europe
    • 4% Central or Eastern Europe
    • 4% Australia /​ New Zealand
    • 5% elsewhere

    (Adds up to more than 100% because some people checked more one location, and because of rounding.)

    Live:

    • 59% USA/​Canada
    • 28% Western Europe
    • 4% Central or Eastern Europe
    • 4% Australia /​ New Zealand
    • 5% elsewhere

    Almost identical to the results for “educated.”

    [Post updated 8 April 2009 to correct a couple of minor transcription errors. These did not materially effect the results, being differences of 0.5% and 1.5%. – T]
    [Post formatting updated 3 May 2011 to work better with current CSS template.]

  • A font by any other name?

    [UPDATE 5 Mar 2009: Survey is now closed. I am analyzing and writing up the results.]

    I’ve noticed over the years that there isn’t a perfect consensus on the use of certain terms, such as “font” and “typeface.” I am of the opinion that there is a strong majority usage, and historical precedent, but I’m curious to understand better current usage, and how it differs by degree of font expertise (a.k.a “geekiness”) and/​or geographic location.

    Please take my survey. I’ll let it run until I feel like I’ve got enough responses, then I’ll post the results and my analysis.

    I’m eager to learn more. Is there a gap between expert usage and the average user? Maybe we’ll discover that I’m just a stick in the mud regarding terms that have mutated over time… or maybe I’ll get ammunition to defend the Wikipedia definitions from the clueless, and persuade type foundries to standardize their langauge. Stay tuned!

    SPOILER ALERT! Please don’t read the comments below until after you’ve done the survey! There are definitely some… well, not spoilers, but potential influencers and links to other pieces on the subject. Thanks!

    [UPDATE: Survey results are here.]