Developing your knowledge

In this section, you will learn the terminology and structure of a letter. Knowing the what and where will make you a better writer and more importantly, a better reader. You'll start recognizing other people's mistakes, the world is full of them

The following points are the real foundation of writing, what lies beneath the splendid coherent surface of a text:

After seeing each character on its own, lets look at the bigger picture:

Typefaces are made of multiple fonts, which are made of multiple characters.

As of today, whereas type is laid principally on screens and not on paper, this distinction practically merged the two terms into the generic font one. Old printing and typesetting machines used letters carved out of metal imposed on woodblocks that needed to be covered in ink and then pushed on paper, leaving a trace. For this reason, each letter was unique and had to be made from scratch, for each weight and style within the same typeface. While your font may have 512 glyphs that weigh a certain kilobytes, the original handmade version had 512 physical blocks, (one for each letter), that weighed kilos. Therefore, with so many objects around that needed to be ordered in some way and so the division between style set and the complete typeface was born.

In addition, the same story of moving blocks gave birth to almost every other typography related terminology that we use today, even in the digital age. They will be addressed later in this topic.