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Typography 500

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The font groups

The fonts on Professional Typography Expert 500 are split into groups. These groups all contain fonts with similar features.

Decorative group

These are specialised heading fonts. Most of these are not suitable for use as the main body font of a document but should be used for headings and logos.

Digital group

This group contains two types of fonts. With Monospaced fonts, such as MonoLetter™, each character has the same width. They can be used as an alternative to Corpus in situations where character widths must be identical. The other type of font in this group (e.g. Alpha™) are decorative fonts designed to appear like typewriter output or digital displays.

Designer group

These are all modern faces as used in many magazines. They all have a narrow width and are meant to be used for headings and logos.

Eastern Group

This group contains decorative fonts with an Eastern Style. These fonts should be used for headings and logos.

Gothic group

The fonts in this group are all what is commonly known as Gothic in appearance, the correct term is in fact Blackletter. These fonts are mainly decorative although some can be used for body copy. They are mainly old German/English style fonts as used in ecclesiastical documents.

NonLatin group

This contains two font families, one for Hebrew and the other for Greek.

OpenFace group

This group contains outline fonts. These are fonts that are not filled but are drawn as an outline. Some fonts in this group are unique (e.g. Broadnib™) and some are versions of fonts found in other groups (e.g. GylesSans.Outline™). These fonts are best used for headings and logos.

SansSerif group

This group contains sanserif fonts which can be used for body copy and headings. Homerton is an example of a sanserif font. Often a sansserif font is used for headings and a serif font for the body of the document.

Script group

This group contains a wide variety of fonts. Some fonts look like handwriting (e.g. Designer™ or Cotterell™). Other fonts include decorative scripts such as those used on wedding invitations (e.g. Flourish™ or Spencer™). There are also decorative script fonts (e.g. KortNeon™).

Serif group

This contains serif fonts. These are usually used for the main body copy of a document. At small sizes serif fonts are often more legible than sanserif fonts.

Symbolic group

This contains fonts that do not have normal letters (A to Z) but instead have symbols that can be used as bullet points or to liven up a document design.

Uncial group

This contains fonts that have a celtic appearance. Although some of these fonts are not truly uncial (no upper case), they all have similar features. These fonts can be used for both headings and body copy.

Western group

This group contains decorative fonts that have an American wild west feel to them. They are best used for posters and headings. You can easily see samples of all the fonts using the iFontView application on this CD. You can also print out samples of any of the fonts using the FontCat application. If you know what sort of fonts you want but not which ones then try using the iDesigner application in the FONTTOOLS directory. This will be able to suggest font combinations that you might want to use.

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