Font vs. Font

What’s a font? Believe it or not, not everyone knows what a font is. So, we decided to write a quick article to help distinguish the difference.

This is a font:

A font is essentially a collection of characters (character set) with a similar design or look.

These can include lowercase and uppercase letters, numbers, punctuation, special characters, and international characters for foreign languages.

A font on a computer is actually its own program that tells an application how selected text should look in the window, and when talking to a printer for how text should look when printed on paper or a physical surface.

This is also a font:

This has nothing to do with a typeface people use to communicate letter and language. This font is a reservoir or receptacle in a church for the water used in a baptism. It can also be considered as a source for something desirable or a commodity, like a “font of wisdom” or “font of beauty.” Or, a spring or fountain.

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But wait, you just talked about a typeface. Isn’t that the same thing as a font?

Sort of.

A typeface is generally considered to be a collection of fonts from the same family. That means, the regular, bold, italic, condensed, wide, narrow and other styles of a single style or look. So, if you downloaded the Arial typeface it would most likely include Arial, Arial Bold, Arial Italic, Arial Condensed, etc.

This is the font family that is bundled together into a single typeface.

So, that’s the lesson of the day. Let us know if you have any questions, and stay safe and healthy!