Hi,
Liam R E Quin wrote:
On Tue, 2009-05-12 at 23:27 +0100, Ben Weiner wrote:
[...]
'Typeface' refers to all the members of a visually related font family,
This is usually called "typeface family"... where a typeace is a design
and a font is an implementation of that design, whether in metal, wood,
stone, or software...
Typically the members of the family (each of which would traditionally
have been called a 'fount' or 'font') are regular/Roman, bold, italic,
etc.
Do you have a reference here for such usage? Benton at ATF invented the
term "family" to describe roman + italic + bold (and, later, bold
italic) but a fount was always a single typeface in metal as I had
understood the literature, e.g. Updike, Tracy, etc.
I think we're agreeing here. I can say without a specific reference
that's how 'typeface' is often used in the industry. It saves saying the
word 'family'. And if there is only one member of the family, it
generally doesn't get called a family anyhow ;-)
'Fount' is indeed a single typeface in metal.
My favourite reference for technical stuff about founts, type and design
at the moment is probably /Printers' type in the twentieth century/ by
Richard Southall. Not really one for the casual reader though :-)
Font files can now
contain any number of typeface family members, so perhaps these
multi-member files should be called 'typeface files' instead.
Please don't do that -- US and UK law explicitly uses the terms
"typeface" and "font" as I have described, from my non-lawyer reading;
calling fonts typeface files might weaken their protection.
OK. Wasn't a serious suggestion really ;-)
Cheers,
Ben
--
Ben Weiner | http://readingtype.org.uk/about/contact.html
