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FontFiend

The complete manual for them most advanced Font Editor for RISC OS.

Accent
Defined by Collins as "a mark over a letter to show how it is pronounced." However note that accents can be either above, below or to one side of a letter depending on their type. For Example �, �, �

ASCII code
American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Each letter in a font has an ASCII number. Very simply, when a key is pressed on your keyboard an ASCII code is sent to the computer, the computer then displays the correct shape of character for that code on the screen.

Ascender
Any part of a lower case letter that extends above the x-height. The upper stroke on a lower case h or b etc. The ascender on a font may be slightly higher than the Cap-Height which is the height of Capital letters such as "A".

Base 0 (zero)
Base 0 fonts (such as Homerton & Trinity) contain all of the Latin 1/2/3/4 encodings in 1 extra large font. FontFiend can load these fonts and convert them to any encoding. Note that some font suppliers supply fonts in Base 0 format, but with only the Latin1 letters defined. Base 0 fonts can easily be identified by having a 0 on the end of the Outlines file. For example Resources:$.Fonts.Homerton.Medium.Outlines0.

Base line
An imaginary line that letters sit on. In fact very few letters actually sit on this line. Round characters such as "c" and "o" sit slightly below the base line and above the x-height as round shapes look visually smaller.

Bezier
A bezier is a mathematical description of a curve. Outline fonts use bezier curves to describe letter shapes, in a very similar way to Draw files. Bezier curves consist of a start and end point and two control points that alter the curve that joins the start and end.

Bitmap font
The shapes of the letters in bitmap fonts are actually small pictures made of pixels (sprites). When enlarged or reduced they distort and the pixels begin to show. When the Outline font manager displays a font it basically draws a sprite of each letter on screen in turn.

Blackletter
A typeface which has the appearance of being created with a thick angled pen nib. Blackletter fonts are often wrongly termed Gothic or Old English. The first typeface set by John Guttenburg, one of the earliest designers of movable metal type, was a Blackletter face.

Body copy
The main part of a page of text, not headings or captions. The "Base Style" in Impression should really be called the Body Style as it affects all of the text that does not have a different style applied.

Bold
Font attribute denoting the thickness of the strokes that make the characters. There is no definitive measure of boldness or lightness, one typeface's bold may actually be lighter than another's Regular. The designer of the typeface decides how bold his bold is. Other similar attributes are extra light, light, book, regular, demi bold, ultra bold, heavy, black etc.

Bullet
Large or bold dot * used for emphasising or separating points in a list. Not to be confused with a period centered � which is a decimal point, although it is often used as a small bullet.

Cap height
The height capital letters extend up to from the base line. Some letters, for example rounded ones or sharply pointed ones, extend above this. Lower case letters such as "h" may extend above the cap height.

Character
A single letter in a font. Not just the normal A-Z and letters but also symbols such as �. Some fonts such is Dingbats contain only symbols as characters. Characters contains outlines, skeletons, composites and scaffolds. See chapter 1 of this manual for more information.

Character Set (Encoding)
A character set is the entire list of letters and or symbols available in a font. Most Acorn fonts have a Latin 1 character set. The character sets are designed by the International Standards Organisation for Acorn machines and by Microsoft for Windows running on an IBM computer.

Condensed
Style attribute of a font: Decker Condensed for example. Condensed characters cannot normally be automatically made by a computer. Condensed typefaces have to be redesigned, otherwise they only appear "squashed". FontFiend's Alter weight dialogue can solve this problem by altering stroke widths in one direction.

Cursive font
A font with a hand written appearance. This name is also applied to fonts that have no upper case letters, often also referred to as "Celtic" fonts.

Descender
Any part of a letter that extends below the base line: The "tail" on a lower case g or q etc.

Dingbat
Small pictogram used as a bullet or other type of attention grabbing device or indicator. Some fonts contain only symbols and no letters. Examples include ITC Zapfs Dingbats designed by Herman Zapf.

Decorative faces
Typefaces designed to be used only in small amounts at quite large sizes. Typically these will have only capital letters and are quite difficult to read when used for body copy.

Em dash
A dash, not a hyphen, as long as the point size of the typeface. See em

Em or em space(Unit of measurement)
Usually a space or gap in text the length of which is the same as the point size. For example, if you are setting 36pt text and have instructions to indent the first line of a paragraph by 1em, then the line should be indented by 36points.

En(Unit of measurement)
Half an em. If the typeface is set at 36 point then 1 Em would be 36 points and an En would be 18 points.

En dash
A dash, not hyphen, half as long as the point size of the typeface. See en

Encoding
An encoding is a text file which lists all the letters that are in a font and what ASCII numbers they have. Most fonts have a Latin1 encoding, they have all the letters required to type in western European languages. Fonts with a Latin 2 encoding have the letters required for eastern European languages (such as Polish). FontFiend can make fonts with either Latin 1,2,3,4 or custom encodings. For information about which languages are supported by which encoding see the Encoding Tables section in the back of the manual. Also see the character set entry.

Extended
Style attribute of a font. Decker Extended for example. FontFiend can make extended fonts using a combination of the Transformation editor and the Alter weight dialogue box. (See Condensed)

Fixed pitch font
A font in which every character takes up the same amount of horizontal space like characters made by a typewriter. These fonts are also referred to as mono-spaced since each letter takes up the same horizontal space. Examples include Courier (Corpus).

Font
A Single typeface for example Trinity Italic.Many people say a font when they actually mean a Font Family. The font Trinity.Italic is actually one weight from the Trinity type face family.

Fontitis
An affliction from which inexperienced DTP operators suffer. Symptoms include many different typefaces in lots of sizes and weights on the same page, everything set in upper case, and lots of shadows, auto-expanded, auto-condensed and other generally distorted text.

Gothic
Font attribute meaning the font is sans serif. Usually used where there is a sans serif version of a serif face, Clear Gothic, for example.

Hinting
Extra information coded into all quality fonts which ensures the characters remain symmetrical and correctly shaped when displayed on screen or printed. Hinting also ensures that fine parts of letters do not disappear when their size is reduced so much that these parts become less than one pixel thick. This is very important for resolutions below 1200 dpi.

Italic
Font attribute. The italic version of a font is angled usually by between 5 and 20 degrees off the perpendicular. The characters are also redesigned to appear more cursive. Italic characters cannot be automatically made by any computer or programmer. See Oblique

Leading (Pronounced Ledding)
Extra space added between lines of text. Printers used to do this by placing strips of lead between lines of letters. This is sometimes also known as line spacing but leading is the correct term.

Left side bearing (LSB)
The offset of the left side of each character from the position (0,0). Some fonts have no left side bearing, script fonts often have a left side bearing defined in each character.

Ligatures
Two or more letters designed as a single entity, f and i for example are designed as a single character (fi) in which the dot over the i is often removed. Not to be confused with diphthongs which are actually letters in their own right.

Non-ranging or Oldstyle numerals
Numbers that have x-height, ascenders and descenders, these are sometime called lower case numerals.

Oblique
Font attribute. The Oblique version of a font is angled usually by 5 and 20 degrees off the perpendicular. Unlike an Italic font none of the characters are re-designed.

Outline font
The shapes of the letters in outline fonts are described by bezier curves and so can be scaled to any size without any loss of shape or accuracy. Most modern computers use Outline fonts since they can be used at any size. Hinting ensures that at small sizes the font is not corrupted when displayed on screen.

Pica
12 points or 1/6th of an inch. This is sometimes called a pica em, and should not be confused with an em or em space.

Pixel
Picture Element. A single dot many of which are used to display a picture. The fonts displayed on any monitor are composed of pixels - even if they are outline fonts because a monitor can only display pixels

Point
1/72nd of an inch. If type is set at 72 point one would imagine that the text would be one inch high, this is not the case. See the entry Point Size for an explanation

Point size
The size of the letters used to set the text. This is complicated by the fact that in the days of metal type the point size referred to the "height" of the piece of metal the shape of the character is stuck out from. Today there is no such piece of metal, so to the casual observer point sizes of typefaces appear to be arbitrary, and differ considerably from face to face. The designer of the typeface decides how much space there should be between lines of text if no extra space, or leading, is added. This overall height of the actual letters plus the designers minimum space adds up to the point size.

Proportional spaced font
Font in which all the letters have different horizontal widths, for example an I will take up less horizontal space than an M.

Sans serif typeface
A typeface in which the letters have no serifs, Helvetica, for example.

Serif
Short terminating lines at the ends of letter strokes. Trinity is a serif font whereas Homerton is a sans-serif font (ie it has no serifs).

Serif typeface
A typeface in which the letters have serifs, Times, for example. The design of serif faces has changed over the years. Originally a serif face would have been closer to hand-writing in style. More modern fonts have an engraved type serif which is vertical. Modern serif faces first appeared in Venice in the late 15th century.

Shilling fraction
A fraction in which the numerator and denominator do not sit directly above and below one another e.g. ¾ or ½. See stacked fraction

Small Caps
Capital letters designed to have the same or very slightly larger size than the font's x-height, but which have the same weight. FontFiend can generate small caps automatically. You may need to manually alter the weight of small caps generated by FontFiend using Alter weight.

Smart quotes
Single or double quotation marks which have correct opening (or left hand or 66) and closing (or right hand or 99) shapes. Many people incorrectly use the symbols for feet and inches ( ' and " ) instead.

Stacked fraction
A fraction in which the numerator and denominator sit directly above and below one another. See shilling fraction.

Swash letter
A letter with elaborate flowing tails and curves. Swash caps are often used to add decoration.

Typeface or Typeface Family
A group of fonts with the same name: Times, Times Italic, Times Bold, etc.

Weight
The weight of a typeface is its overall appearance of light or black. A bold or heavy font appears darker because the character's strokes are thicker and less of the white page can show through.

x-height
The size of lower case letters without ascenders or descenders, most of the time this is actually the size of the lower case x.

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