Typography 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. Type design is a closely related craft, sometimes considered part of typography; most typographers do not design typefaces, and some type designers do not consider themselves typographers. Typography also may be used as an ornamental and decorative device, unrelated to the communication of information.
A monospaced font, also called a fixed-pitch, fixed-width, or non-proportional font, is a font whose letters and characters each occupy the same amount of horizontal space. This contrasts with variable-width fonts, where the letters and spacings have different widths.
Typographic units are the units of measurement used in typography or typesetting. Traditional typometry units are different from familiar metric units because they were established in the early days of printing. Though most printing is digital now, the old terms and units have persisted.
In typography, leading is the space between adjacent lines of type; the exact definition varies.
XSL-FO is a markup language for XML document formatting that is most often used to generate PDF files. XSL-FO is part of XSL, a set of W3C technologies designed for the transformation and formatting of XML data. The other parts of XSL are XSLT and XPath. Version 1.1 of XSL-FO was published in 2006.
An em is a unit in the field of typography, equal to the currently specified point size. For example, one em in a 16-point typeface is 16 points. Therefore, this unit is the same for all typefaces at a given point size.
In word processing and digital typesetting, a nonbreaking space, also called NBSP, required space, hard space, or fixed space, is a space character that prevents an automatic line break at its position. In some formats, including HTML, it also prevents consecutive whitespace characters from collapsing into a single space. Nonbreaking space characters with other widths also exist.
In typography, the point is the smallest unit of measure. It is used for measuring font size, leading, and other items on a printed page. The size of the point has varied throughout printing's history. Since the 18th century, the size of a point has been between 0.18 and 0.4 millimeters. Following the advent of desktop publishing in the 1980s and 1990s, digital printing has largely supplanted the letterpress printing and has established the desktop publishing (DTP) point as the de facto standard. The DTP point is defined as 1⁄72 of an international inch (1/72 × 25.4 mm ≈ 0.353 mm) and, as with earlier American point sizes, is considered to be 1⁄12 of a pica.
A column inch was the standard measurement of the amount of content in published works that use multiple columns per page. A column inch is a unit of space one column wide by 1 inch (25 mm) high.
In typography, letter spacing, character spacing or tracking is an optically consistent adjustment to the space between letters to change the visual density of a line or block of text. Letter spacing is distinct from kerning, which adjusts the spacing of particular pairs of adjacent characters such as "7." which would appear to be badly spaced if left unadjusted.
In graphic design, a grid is a structure made up of a series of intersecting straight or curved lines used to structure content. The grid serves as an armature or framework on which a designer can organize graphic elements in a rational, easy-to-absorb manner. A grid can be used to organize graphic elements in relation to a page, in relation to other graphic elements on the page, or relation to other parts of the same graphic element or shape.
In graphic design, page layout is the arrangement of visual elements on a page. It generally involves organizational principles of composition to achieve specific communication objectives.
In typesetting and page layout, alignment or range is the setting of text flow or image placement relative to a page, column (measure), table cell, or tab.
In computer programming, whitespace is any character or series of characters that represent horizontal or vertical space in typography. When rendered, a whitespace character does not correspond to a visible mark, but typically does occupy an area on a page. For example, the common whitespace symbol U+0020 SPACE represents a blank space punctuation character in text, used as a word divider in Western scripts.
In typography, line length is the width of a block of typeset text, usually measured in units of length like inches or points or in characters per line. A block of text or paragraph has a maximum line length that fits a determined design. If the lines are too short then the text becomes disjointed; if they are too long, the content loses rhythm as the reader searches for the start of each line.
In typography, a margin is the area between the main content of a page and the page edges. The margin helps to define where a line of text begins and ends. When a page is justified the text is spread out to be flush with the left and right margins. When two pages of content are combined next to each other, the space between the two pages is known as the gutter. The top and bottom margins of a page are also called "head" and "foot", respectively. The term "margin" can also be used to describe the edge of internal content, such as the right or left edge of a column of text.
Microtypography is a range of methods for improving the readability and appearance of text, especially justified text. The methods reduce the appearance of large interword spaces and create edges to the text that appear more even. Microtypography methods can also increase reading comprehension of text, reducing the cognitive load of reading.
The holy grail is a web page layout which has multiple equal-height columns that are defined with style sheets. It is commonly desired and implemented, but for many years, the various ways in which it could be implemented with available technologies all had drawbacks. Because of this, finding an optimal implementation was likened to searching for the elusive Holy Grail.
Optical margin alignment outdents letters like A, V, W, Y, and punctuation into the margins to align the text border optically. Some users remark that it makes the text margin look crooked, but this is because text frames or margin guides are visible. If text frames are not visible, e.g. in print preview, or when printed, the edge of a block of text looks more even if optical margin alignment is enabled.
