I Can’t Sleep - Typeface | Gentle Bedtime Reading for Sleep

Episode Date: December 11, 2019

Ease into rest with calm bedtime reading about typefaces to help insomnia and sleepless nights fade away. This soothing episode explores the history and design of typefaces, from early movable type to the digital fonts we use today. Benjamin’s relaxing cadence turns the art and science of letters into a peaceful journey of learning. There’s no whispering or hypnosis—just calm, fact-filled storytelling to reduce stress, quiet the mind, and invite sleep. Press play, relax, and drift off while discovering the beauty of type. Want More? Request a Topic: https://www.icantsleeppodcast.com/request-a-topic Ad-Free Episodes: https://icantsleep.supportingcast.fm/ Shop Sleep-Friendly Products: https://www.icantsleeppodcast.com/sponsors Join the Discussion on Discord: https://discord.gg/myhGhVUhn7 This content is derived from the Wikipedia article on Typeface, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) license. Read the full article: Wikipedia – Typeface. Happy sleeping! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to a Glassbox media podcast. What if I told you that most of the modern day self-help advice you've been hearing could actually make you worse? The key to a better life isn't about feel-good gimmicks that sound catchy. The Mentally Stronger Podcast gives you access to a licensed therapist who shares science-backed tools that will actually change your life. Hi, I'm Amy Morin, psychotherapist, mental strength trainer, and international best-selling author. In each episode, we cover research-back strategies, like how to stop relying on willpower and start creating habits for lasting change. And the five mental strength-building exercises you can do from your couch. I also speak to world-class experts like Dr. Nicole Kane, who shares how to permanently heal anxiety by addressing the root cause.

With over 200 episodes in our catalog, this podcast is for you if you're ready to crush self-doubt, conquer challenges, and become stronger than ever with therapist-approved strategies that can change your life. Listen to Mentally Stronger with therapist Amy Morin, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the I Can't Sleep podcast, where I read random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice. I'm your host, Benjamin Boster. Today's episode is from a Wikipedia article titled Typeface. In typography, a typeface. Typeface, also known as font family, is a set of one or more fonts, each composed of glyphs that share common design features.

Each font of a typeface has a specific weight, style, condensation, width, slant, italicization, ornamentation, and designer or foundry, and formally size in metal fonts. For example, ITC Garamon Bold condensed italic means the bold condensed with italic version of ITC Garamond. It is a different font from ITC Garamond condensed italic and ITC Garamond bold condensed. But all are fonts within the same typeface. ITC Garamond. ITC Garamond is a different typeface from Adobe Garamond. or monotype garamond. These are all alternative updates or digitizations of the typeface Garamond,

originally created in the 16th century. There are thousands of different typefaces in existence, with new ones being developed constantly. The art and craft of designing typefaces is called type design. Designers of typefaces are called type designers, and are often employed by type foundries. In digital topography, type designers are sometimes also called font developers

or font designers. Every typeface is a collection of glyphs, each of which represents an individual letter, number, punctuation mark, or other symbol. The same glyph may be used for characters from different scripts, e.g. Roman uppercase, A looks the same as Cyrillic uppercase A and Greek uppercase alpha. There are typefaces

tailored for special applications such as mapmaking or astrology and mathematics. The term typeface is frequently confused with the term font. Before the advent of digital topography and desktop publishing, the two terms had more clearly understood meanings. Terminology. In professional topography, the term typeface is not interchangeable with the word font, originally found in British English and pronounced font. Because the term font has historically been defined as a given alphabet and its associated characters in a single size. For example, 8-point Caslin Italic was one font, and 10-point Caslin Italic was another. Historically, fonts came in specific sizes determining the size of characters and in quantities of sorts or number of each letter provided.

The design of characters in a font took into account all these factors. As the range of typeface designs increased and requirements of publishers broadened over the centuries, fonts of specific weight, blackness or lightness, and stylized. variants, most commonly regular or Roman as distinct to italic, as well as condensed, have led to font families, collections of closely related typeface designs that can include hundreds of styles. A font family is typically a group of related fonts which vary only in weight, orientation, width, etc., but not design. For example, Times is a font family, whereas Times Roman, times italic, and Times Bold are individual fonts making up the Times family.

Font families typically include several fonts, though some, such as Havetica, may consist of dozens of fonts. The distinction between font and typeface is that a font designates a specific member of a type family, such as Roman, boldface, or italic type. while typeface designates a consistent visual appearance or style, which can be a family or related set of fonts. For example, a given typeface such as Ariel may include Roman, bold, and italic fonts. In the metal type era, a font also meant a specific point size, but with digital scalable outline fonts, this distinction is no longer valid, as a single font may be scaled to any size. The first extended font families,

which included a wide range of widths and weights in the same general style, emerged in the early 1900s, starting with ATF's Cheltenham, 1902 to 1913, with an initial design by Bertram-Grosvener Goodhue and many additional faces designed by Morris Fuller Benton. Later examples include Futura, Lucida, ITC, Ophesina. Some became superfamilies as a result of revival, such as Linotype Syntax, Linotype Universe.

While others have alternate styling designed as compatible replacements of each other, such as compatel generis, typeface superfamilies began to emerge when foundries began. to include typefaces with significant structural differences, but some design relationship under the same general family name. Arguably, the first superfamily was created when Morris Fuller Benton created Clearface Gothic for ATF in 1910, a sans-serif companion to the existing serifed Clearface. The superfamily label does not include quite different designs given the same family. family name for what would seem to be purely marketing rather than design considerations.

Caslin antique, Futura Black, and Futura display are structurally unrelated to the Caslin and Futura families, respectively, and are generally not considered part of those families by topographers despite their names. Additional or supplemental glyphs intended to match a main typeface have been in use for centuries. In some formats, they have been marketed as separate fonts. In the early 1990s, the Adobe Systems Type Group introduced the idea of expert set fonts, which had a standardized set of additional glyphs, including small caps, old style figures, and additional superior letters, fractions, and ligatures not found in the main fonts for the typeface.

Supplemental fonts have also included alternate letters, such as swashes, dingbats, and alternate character sets complementing the regular fonts under the same family. However, with introduction of font formats such as open type, those supplemental glyphs were merged into the main fonts, relying on specific software capabilities to access the alternate glyphs. Since Apple's and Microsoft's operating systems supported different, character sets in the platform-related fonts. Some foundries used expert fonts in a different way. These fonts included the characters which were missing on either Macintosh or Windows computers,

e.g. fractions, ligatures, or some accented glyphs. The goal was to deliver the whole character set to the customer regardless of which operating system was used. The size of typefaces and fonts is traditionally measured in points. Point has been defined differently at different times, but now the most popular is the desktop publishing point of 1 over 72 inches. When specified in typographic sizes, points, key use, the height of an M square, an invisible box, which is typically a bit larger than the distance from the tallest decender to the lowest decender,

is scaled to equal the specified height. For example, when setting Helvetica at 12 point, the EM square defined in the Helvetica font is scaled to 12 points or one-sixth inch. Yet no particular element of 12-point Helvetica need measure exactly 12 points. Frequently, measurement in non-typographic units, feet, inches, meters, will be of the cap height, the height of the capital letters. font size is also commonly measured in millimeters and QS, a quarter of a millimeter, Q in Romanized Japanese, and inches. History Type foundries have cast fonts in lead alloys from the 1450s until the present.

Although wood served as the material for some large fonts called wood type during the 19th century, particularly in the United States. In the 1890s, the mechanization of type-setting allowed automated casting of fonts on the fly as lines of type in the size and length needed. This was known as continuous casting and remained profitable and widespread until its demise in the 1970s.

The first machine of this type was the Linotype machine, invented by Otmar Murgenthaler. During a brief transitional period, 1950s to 1990s, photographic technology known as phototype setting utilized tiny high-resolution images of individual glyphs on a film strip in the form of a film negative, with the letters as clear areas on an opaque black background. A high-intensity light source behind the film strip

projected the image of each glyph through an optical system, which focused the desired letter onto the light-sensitive phototype setting paper at a specific size and position. This photographic type-setting process permitted optical scaling, allowing designers to produce multiple sizes from a single font, although physical constraints on the reproduction system use still require design changes at different sizes. For example, ink traps and spikes to allow for spread of ink encountered in the printing stage. manually operated photo composition systems using fonts on film strips, allowed fine kerning between letters without the physical effort of manual typesetting,

and spawned in a large type design industry in the 1960s and 1970s. By the mid-1970s, all of the major typeface technologies and all their fonts were in use, letterpress, continuous casting machines, phototypositors, computer-controlled phototypesetters, computer-controlled photo typesetters, and the earliest digital typesetters, bulky machines with primitive processors and CRT outputs. From the mid-1980s, as digital typography has grown, users have almost universally adopted the American spelling font, which has come to primarily refer to a computer file containing scalable outline letter forms,

digital font, in one of the several common formats. Some typefaces such as Verdana are designed primarily for use on computer screens. Digital type Digital type became the dominant form of type in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Digital fonts store the image of each character either as a bitmap and a bitmap font or by mathematical description of lines and curves in an outline font, also called a vector font. Bitmap fonts were more commonly used in the earlier stages of digital type

and are rarely used today. These bitmap typefaces were first produced by Cassidy and Green Inc. And were also known as fluent fonts. Fluent fonts became mostly obsolete with the creation of downloadable post-script fonts. and these new fonts are called Fluent Laser Fonts, FLF. When an outline font is used to the rasterizing routine in the application software operating system or printer, renders the character outlines,

interpreting the vector instructions to decide which pixels should be black and which one's white. Rasterization is straightforward at high resolutions, such as those used by laser printers, and in high-end publishing systems. For computer screens, where each individual pixel can mean the difference between legible and illegible characters. Some digital fonts use hinting algorithms to make readable bitmaps at small sizes. Digital fonts may also contain data representing the metrics used for composition,

including kerning pairs, component creation data for accented characters, glyph substitution rules for Arabic typography, and for connecting script, faces, and for simple everyday ligatures like FL. Common font formats include TrueType, OpenType, and PostScript Type 1, while MetaFond is still used by text and its variants. Applications using these font formats, including the rasterizers, appear in Microsoft and Apple computer operating systems, Adobe Systems, products, and those of several other companies. Digital fonts are created with font editors such as Fontforge, RoboFont, glyphs, font labs,

TypeTool, FontLab Studio, Fontographer, or Asia Font Studio. Typeface Anatomy. Typographers have developed a comprehensive vocabulary for describing the many aspects of typefaces and typography. Sun vocabulary applies only to a subset of all scripts. Saris, for example, are a purely decorative characteristic of typefaces used for European scripts, whereas the glyphs used in Arabic or East Asian scripts have characteristics, such as stroke width, that may be similar in some respects, but cannot reasonably be called seraphs, and may not be purely decorative. Typefaces can be divided,

into two main categories, seraph and sans-serif. Seriffs comprise the small features of the end of strokes within letters. The printing industry refers to typeface without seraphs as sans-serif, from French sans, meaning without. Or a grotesque, or in German, grotesque. Great variety exists among both serif and sans-serif typefaces. Both groups contain faces designed for setting large amounts of body text, and others intended primarily as decorative.

The presence or absence of seris represents only one of many factors to consider when choosing a typeface. Typefaces with seraphs are often considered easier to read in long passages than those without. Studies on the matter are ambiguous, suggesting that most of this effect is due to the greater familiarity of seraph. typefaces. As a general rule, printed works such as newspapers and books almost always use seraph typefaces, at least for the text body. Websites do not have to specify a font and can simply respect the browser settings of the user. But of those websites that do specify a font, most use modern sans-serif fonts, because it is commonly believed that in contrast to the case for printed material, sans serif fonts are easier than serif fonts to read on the low-resolution

computer screen. Proportion. A proportional typeface contains glyphs of varying widths, while a non-proportional or fixed-width typeface uses a single standard width for all glyphs in the font. Duospaced fonts are similar to monospaced fonts, but characters can also be two character widths instead of a single character width. Many people generally find proportional typefaces nicer looking and easier to read, and thus they appear more commonly and professionally published printed material. Citation needed. For some reason, GUI computer applications such as word processors and web browsers typically use proportional fonts. However, many proportional fonts contain fixed width tabular figures so that columns and numbers stay aligned. Monospace typefaces function better for some purposes because their glyphs

line up and need regular columns. No glyph has given any more weight than another. Most manually operated typewriters use monospaced fonts. So do text-only computer displays and third and fourth generation game console graphic processors, which treat the screen as a uniform grid of character cells. Most computer programs, which have a text-based interface, terminal emulators, for example, use only monospaced fonts, or add additional spacing to proportional fonts to fit them in monospace cells in their configuration. Monospaced fonts are commonly used by computer programmers for displaying and editing source code, so that certain characters, for example, parentheses used to group arithmetic expressions are easy to see.

Monospaced fonts may also make it easier to perform optical character recognition. ASC2 art usually requires a monospace font for proper viewing, with the exception of Shift JIS art, which takes advantage of the proportional characters in the MS-E Gothic font. Any two lines of text with the same number of characters in each line in a monospaced typeface should display as equal in width, while the same two lines in a proportional typeface may have radically different widths. This occurs because in a proportional font,

glyph widths varies such that wider glyphs, typically those for characters such as W, Q, Z, M, D, O, H, and U, use more space and narrower glyphs, such as those for the characters, i t l and one used less space than the average in the publishing industry it was once the case that editors read manuscripts in monospaced fonts typically courier for ease of editing and word count estimates and it was considered discourteous to submit a manuscript in a proportional font citation needed this has become less universal in recent years such as that author need to check with editors as to their preference, though monospaced fonts are still the norm. Font metrics. Most scripts share the notation of a baseline, an imaginary horizontal line on which

characters rest. In some scripts, parts of glyphs lie below the baseline. The descent spans the distance between the baseline and the lowest descending glyph in a typeface, and the part of a glyph that descends below the baseline has the name dissender. Conversely, the ascent spans the distance between the baseline and the top of the glyph that reaches farthest from the baseline. The ascent and descent may or may not include distance added by accents or diacritical marks. In the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic, sometimes collectively referred to as LGC scripts, one can refer to the distance from the baseline to the top of the top of the of regular lowercase glyphs mean line as the X height and the part of a glyph rising above

the X height as the Ascender. The distance from the baseline to the top of the Ascent or a regular uppercase glyph cap line is also known as the cap height. The height of the ascender can have a dramatic effect on the readability and appearance of a font. The ratio between the X height and the ascent or cap height often serves to characterize typefaces. Typefaces that can be substituted for one another in a document without changing the documents text flow are said to be metrically identical or metrically compatible. Several typefaces have been created to be metrically compatible with widely used proprietary typefaces to allow the editing of documents set in such typefaces in digital typesitting environments where these typefaces

are not available. For instance, the free and open source liberation fonts and cross-core fonts have been designed as metrically compatible substitutes for widely used Microsoft fonts. Optical sizing During the metal type era, all type was cut in metal and could only be printed at a specific size. It was a natural process to vary a design at different sizes, making it chunkier and clearer to read at smaller sizes. Many digital typefaces are offered with a range of fonts or a variable font access for different sizes, especially designed sold for professional design use.

The art of designing fonts for a specific size is known as optical sizing. Others will be offered in only one style, but optimized for a specific size. Optical sizes are particularly common for seraph fonts, since the fine fine. detail of seraphons may need to be bulked up for smaller sizes. Typefaces may also be designed differently considering the type of paper on which they will be printed. Designs to be printed on absorbent newsprint and paper will be more slender as the ink will naturally spread out as it absorbs into the paper and may feature ink traps, areas left blank into which the ink will soak as it drives. These corrections will not be needed for printing on high gloss cardboard or display on screen.

Fonts designed for low resolution displays, meanwhile, may avoid pure circles, fine lines and details screen cannot render. Typesetting numbers. Most typefaces, especially modern designs, include a complementary set of numeric digits. Numbers can be typeset in two main independent sets of ways, lining and non-lining figures, and proportional and tabular styles. Most modern typefaces set numeric digits by default as lining figures, which are the height of uppercase letters. Non-lining figures styled to match lowercase letters

are often common in fonts intended for body text, as they are thought to be less disruptive to the style of running text. They are also called lowercase numbers or text figures for the same reason. The horizontal spacing of digits can also be proportional with a character width tightly matching the width of the figure itself, or tabular, where all digits have the same width. Proportional spacing places the digits closely together, reducing empty space in a document,

and is sought to allow the numbers to blend into the next more effectively. As tabular spacing makes all numbers, numbers with the same number of digits the same width. These use for typesetting documents such as price lists, stock listings and sums and mathematical textbooks, all of which require columns of numeric figures to line up on top of each other for easier comparison. Tabular spacing is also a common feature of simple printing devices,

such as cash registers and date stamps. Characters of uniform width are a standard feature of so-called monospace space fonts used in programming and on typewriters. However, many fonts that are not monos-based use tabular figures. More complex font designs may include two or more combinations with one as the default and others as alternate characters. Of the four possibilities, non-lining tabular figures are particularly rare since there is no common use for them.

Fonds intended for professional use in documents such as business reports may also make the bold-style tabular figures take up the same width as the regular non-bold numbers. So a bold-style total would appear just as wide as the same sum in regular style. Style of typefaces Because an abundance of typefaces has been created over the centuries, they are commonly categorized according to their appearance. At the highest level, in the context of Latin script fonts, one can differentiate Roman, black letter, and Gaelic types. Roman types are in the most widespread use today and are subclassified as serif, sans serif, ornamental, and script types. Historically, the first European fonts were black letter, followed by Roman serif,

then sans serif, and then the other types. The use of Gaelic faces was restricted to the Irish language, though these form a unique, if minority, class. Typefaces may be monospace regardless of whether they are Roman, black letter, or Gaelic. Symbol typefaces are non-alphabetic. The Cyrillic script comes in two varieties, Roman type and traditional Slavic type. Roman type faces. Seraph or Roman typefaces are named for the features at the ends of their strokes. Times New Roman and Garamond are common examples of seraph typefaces.

Seraphons are probably the most used glass and printed materials, including most books, newspapers, and magazines. Seraphons are often classified into three subcategories, old style, transitional, and dydon, or modern. representative examples of which are Garamund, Baskerville, and Bodoni, respectively. Old-style typefaces are influenced by early Italian lettering design. Modern fonts often exhibit a bracketed seraph and a substantial difference in weight within the strokes. Though some argument exists as to whether transitional fonts exist as a discrete category among seraph fonts, transitional fonts lie somewhere between old style and modern style typefaces. Transitional fonts exhibit a marked increase in the variation of stroke, weight, and a more horizontal seraph compared to old style.

Slab seraph designs have particularly large seraphs, and date to the early 19th century. The earliest slab seraph font antique, later renamed Egyptian, was first shown in 1815 by the English type of founder Vincent Figgins. Roman, italic, and oblique are also terms used to differentiate between upright and two possible slanted forms of a typeface. Italic and oblique fonts are similar. Indeed, oblique fonts are often simply called italics. There is strictly a difference.

Italic applies to fonts where the letter forms are redesigned, not just slanted. almost all seraph faces have italic forms some sans-serif faces have oblique designs most faces do not offer both as this is an artistic choice by the font designer about how the slanted form should look sans-serif type faces sans-serif without seraph designs appeared relatively recently in the history of type design

the first similar to slab seraph designs was shown in 1816 by William Caslin IV. Sancerif fonts are commonly but not exclusively used for display typography such as signage, headings, and other situations demanding legibility above higher readability. A text on electronic media offers an exception to print. Most webpages in digitization media are laid out in sans-serif typefaces because serifs often detract from readability at the low resolution of displays,

citation needed. Many have minimal variation in stroke with creating the impression of a minimal simplified design. A well-known and popular sans serifond is Max Matinger's Helvetica, popularized for desktop publishing by inclusion with Apple computers laser writer, laser printer, and having been one of the first readily available digital typefaces. Ariel, popularized by Microsoft, is a common Helvetica substitute. Other fonts such as Futura, Gil Sands, Universe, and Frutiger have also remained popular over many decades. Blackletter typefaces

Blackletter fonts, the earliest typefaces used with the invention of the printing press in Europe, resemble the black letter calligraphy of that time and place. many people refer to them as Gothic script. Various forms exist including textualis, rotunda, Shvarbaka, and Fractur, Gaelic typefaces. Gaelic fonts were first used for the Irish language in 1571, and were used regularly for Irish until the early 1960s. They continue to be used in display type and type for signage.

Their use was effectively confined to Ireland, though Gaelic typefaces were designed and produced in France, Belgium, and Italy. Gaelic typefaces make use of insular letter forms, and early fonts made use of a variety of abbreviations deriving from the manuscript tradition. Early fonts used the Anglo-Saxon language, also using insular letter forms, can be classified as Gaelic typefaces, distinct from Roman or Antiqua typefaces. Various forms exist, including manuscript, traditional, and modern styles, chiefly distinguishes having angular or unshull features.

Monospaced typefaces Monospaced fonts are typefaces in which every glyph is the same width as opposed to variable width fonts, where the W and M are wider than most letters, and the I is narrower. The first monospace typefaces were designed for typewriters, which could only move the same distance forward with each letter typed. Their use continued with early computers, which could only display a single font. Although modern computers can display any desired typeface,

monospaced fonts are still important for computer programming, terminal emulation, and for laying out tabulated data and plain text documents. It may also be particularly legible at small sizes due to all characters being quite wide, examples of monospace typefaces are courier prestige elite fixis and monaco most monospaced fonts are sans serif or slab serif as these designs are easiest to read printed small or display on low resolution screens though many exceptions exist