Check
Writer III+
Print your checks and the
accompanying letter on the same page
(voucher).
Print one or three checks per page, standard size or
Wallet (personal), for Windows or Mac.
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Fact
sheet
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Fontmenu.com offers hundreds of original typefaces
and font families for Windows XP and more recent
organized by categories and names.See full
character map, download free fonts samples,
purchase online and get the fonts immediately.
Fonts are optimized for :
-
Windows XP
-
Windows Vista
a.k.a. Lomghorn (and OpenType Glyph
Substitution technology)
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- Throughout
this site, you will encounter strange words, that may not
sound familiar at all. Even "Font", as
simple as it sounds, seems here to mean more. What is for
instance a "font family" ? What is a "Serif font" ?
Answers are here. Or at least, most of them. Such a
glossary isalways a work in progress, as new words and
expressions appear. If you think a word has been left out,
please report
it, ad it will be added right away. Thank you. or is
inaccurate.
-
-
- Ascender
- This is
the upper-reaching part of characters such as "b", "d",
"f", etc.
-
see
also "Descender"
-
- ASCII
- This
encoding scheme is widely used on computer today, tio
provide the basic set of Roman characters. This encoding
scheme has limited support capabilities for accented
characters (diacritics) and
therefore, most current multilangual systems use Unicode,
a much more flexible and efficient system.
-
see
alco "Unicode standard"
-
- Accented
characters
- see "Diacritics"
-
- Bitmap
font
- Screens,
as well as printers, use a technology that separates
elements of the pictures (printed or viewed) in a map of
pixels (picture elements). Early electronic fonts, as well
as screen fonts, use the same technology : each point is
represented by a zero or one, and appears as black or
white, according to mathematical values. For pratical
purposes, bitmap fonts are used for maximum legibility at
small point sizes, or on some systems like Macintosh™ and
PostScript™ fonts, together with printer
fonts.
-
- Black
Letter
- This
refers to the more general term of calligraphed "Old
English" or "Gothic" fonts. These early typefaces where
used by the European inventor of Type, Gutenberg, to set
the very first printed bible. A good exemple of such font
in our collection is Square
Text.
-
- Baseline
- The
imaginary horizontal line used to write. We all used a
very real baseline when learning how to write : it was
usually blue. The baseline is also sometimes named
"reading line".
-
- Body
size
- This is
the point siez obtained from the highest ascender
to the lowest descender, plus
additional white space to the descender line. Depending on
font styles, body size may give different appearance of
letterform size. For instance, the same text may appear
very differently in Helvetica (a usual sans-serif
font) and Times (a usual serif
font).
-
- Boldface
- A darker
typeface with more weight, to emphasize
text.
Bowl - This is
the oval within the round curves of letters such as "d",
"g", "b" and "o".
-
- Calligraphic
fonts, calligraphic typefaces
- Such
fonts imitate "beautiful writing", translation of the
original Greek word that is the origin of the work. Common
calligraphic fonts imitate formal writing, such as
copperplate or square pen calligraphy. Some of them are
more casual in style than others, for instance Chancellerie
Moderne (close to Chancery) looks a lot more formal
than Skryptaag.
- see also
"script fonts"
-
- Cap
line
- The
imaginary line that goes on top of all capital letters.
Character set
- All the
characters contained in a font, as welll as their mapping.
Most fonts on this site have ful character sets, except
for dingbats.
Condensed - Popularized
by dot matrix printers, Condensed typefaces offer an
aspect ratio where the characters are narrower than usual,
and take less space on the line. Therefore, more can
appear on the same line.
Contrast - The
apparent difference of color between thicker and thinner
parts of a character. For instance, a serif font such as TSF
& Compagnie, based on the Bodoni design, has a
high level of contrast, when the modern-style serif Halotique,
where all parts of the character have the same apparent
thickness, has a lower level of contrast. Some sans-serif
faces such as Bordini, have a
high level of contrast.
Counter - The
enclosed, or at least delimited by, space within letters
such as "C", "e", "s", "H". Some confuse it with the bowl.
Cross stroke
- Cross the
"t" and you get a cross stroke ! Also refered to as "cross
bar".
Cursive - see "Script
fonts"
- Descent
- The part
of the character that extends below the baseline, for
instance in "p", "q", "g".
-
- Descender
- The lower
imaginary line that characters that have descending part
extend to, for instance "p", "j", "g", "y"...
-
see
also "Ascender"
- dpi
- This
acronym stands for "Dots Per an Inch". This is the most
common unit of measurement of resolution (sharpness) for
screen, scanners, and printers. The higher number of dpis,
the sharper the image. For instance, a regular PC monitor
can have a resolution of 72 dpi, when a printer will offer
300 dpi, and a typesetting equipement 4800 dpi.
-
- Diacritics
- English
does not use accented characters anymore (very old
English text did use
accented, as well as Eth, since then abandonneedd), but
most other
languages do. French, Spanish, Italian, German, etc...
- see also
"Unicode standard"
Dingbats
- Small
decorative marks like bullets, symbols, pictures,
pictograms, and in our collection, dinosaurs
or halloween characters,
for instance. Such fonts are a great asset for displayed
itemized lists, or to create graphics on pages.
-
- Display
face
- Larger
and bolder version of a text typeface that is used for
titles, headlines and sub-headlines. Also named sometimes
"Title fonts".
Drop cap - An
oversized capital letter used as the start of a paragraph.
Drop cap ornamented initials are a stapple of ancient
manuscripts and older books. They still are used quite
often by news magazines, and on this site, to illustrate
use of some decorative fonts.
ear
Egyptian
eps
expanded
extended
Font
As a general rule,
computers today seem to confuse font and style. For
instance, if you
look at the Times font that comes with most systems,
italics are drawn
auite differently than the regular style. In the ancient
days when lead
was used to cast character, it had to be liquified, "fondu"
in French, hence creating a "fonte".
On
this site, we refere to a font name (for instance Times)
as a
Typeface, and different styles as individual fonts, as in
font files. We
may not use lead anymore, but for the user and the
computer, each font has its own file.
Family - See font,
above. -
- Handwriting
fonts
- see "script
fonts"
-
- Ligature
- Based on
the way handwriting characters connect, some characters
are the result of combining two characters. For instance,
when A and E are ligated, it produces the ligature
Æ. Less common ligatures are fl, ff, st. Such characters
are still widely used by luxury book publishing, for
instance the famous French collection "La Pléïade".
Ligated- Characters
assembled
in a ligature, "linked" the way we naturaly do in Roman
cursive, between an o and any following letter, by
modifying both
glyphs.
Lowercase
See Uppercase
metrics
modern
monospaced
oblique
- Old
English
- see "Black
Letter"
-
- oldstyle
outline
pica
pixel
point
pointsize
postscript
-
- Printer
fonts
- In some
technologies, and on most platforms, fonts sent to the
printer are not necessarily the same as fonts one may see
on the screen. On some systems, screen fonts and printer
fonts are separate, so they can be optimized for this
specific display/use. For instance, Macintosh™ PostScript™
fonts come in two files : a suitcase of bitmap
fonts, a.k.a screen fonts, and a printer font. When
the printer font is missing, printing is very mediocre.
This come from the low resolution of screens, 72 dots per
an inch, as compared to 300 or 600 dpi on any average
printer.
-
- Punch
font
- Before
the advent of computers, fonts were cavufmetal. This
process was called "to punch" type.
-
- proportionally
spaced type
rasterization
-
- Resolution
- see "dpi"
-
- roman
sansserif
serif
-
- Screen
fonts
- see "bitmap
fonts"
-
- Script
fonts, script typefaces, cursive fonts
- Fonts
that mimic handwriting. Such fonts have been used for as
long as typography exist. However, electronic creation
process now authorizes creation of personal handwriting
fonts that where close to impossible to achieve during the
lead type era. Current script fonts dating back from the
early days are Park Avenue or Brush Script, and their
appearance is too much polished to appear to anyone like
human script. Today's handwriting fonts do look like they
had been produced by hand, apart form the unatural respect
of the baseline, and regularity of the script.
-
see
also "Calligraphic
fonts"
Spacing
style
swashcapitals
tail
terminals
textface
truetype
type
type1
typeface
typography
uncial
Unicode
standard
The Unicode standard had its genesis in eraly 1988 when a
group of information professionals with extensive
experience in multilingual computing agreed that no
encoding methodology used in theur fields possessed the
elegance and simplicity of ASCII. The Unicode character
encoding was established as a fixed-width encoding of 16
bits, which would provide a sufficient number of unique
codes for the world's scripts and technical symbols in
comon use, and at the same time promote efficient and
flexible system design.
From
The
Unicode Standard, Version 3.0 -- by The Unicode
Consortium (Editor)
Uppercase
In the old era of lead movable type, typographers had
cases, where they
would place characters, a bit like letter cubes, in trays.
The upper
case contained capital letters, and the lower case
contained minuscule
characters. Today, it means absolutely nothing in
reference to
computers, but you can impress your friends with
background knowledge.
A typographer
composing text with lead type
Weight
X-height
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