User Guide

FontLab User Interface
21
Font
An organized collection of glyphs and font header information. Usually
glyphs that are united in a font have some similarities in design and other
properties.
In the past, a “font” was defined as a single size of the characters of a
particular typeface. Now, since fonts are scalable, the term “font” covers all
possible sizes of the same typeface design.
Encoding
When text is printed an important process takes place: character to glyph
mapping. The source text (in computer form) is a list of codes that
represents a list of characters. A font (see above) is a collection of glyphs.
So there must be some way to relate characters to glyphs so that when the
computer’s operating system encounters a certain character it knows which
glyph to print. This “mapping” (or “vector”) is called the encoding.
Sometimes the encoding information resides within the font itself as part
of the header and other times it is in a separate file.
Font Family
It is important to know the difference between a font and a font family. A
font family is a set of fonts that represents some design idea. “Times” is a
font family (sometimes called typeface). “Times Bold Italic” is a font.
A font family may include from one to a few dozen fonts.