Macintosh Bible, 8th Edition, The

How Fonts Work

When Gutenberg invented movable type more than 500 years ago, he created fonts consisting of sets of metal stamps designed to be arranged in rows, inked, and pressed against paper to make an image of the type. This technology required casting of a separate set of letters for each type size. So in the days of metal type, a font not only represented a specific typeface but also represented that typeface in a specific size.

Then along came offset printing, a technology that created the inked images of pages photographically on flat printing plates. The natural next step was to create type photographically as well, and the first computer typesetting systems used fonts that resembled film negatives. These systems projected light through ...