Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Font Families

There are many terms associated with fonts, we'll describe some of them here.
Serifs are the decorative hooks and barbs on the ends of letters found in some fonts. Fonts that have serifs are called serif fonts. Sans-serif fonts are those fonts whose letters do not have serifs. Proportional Fonts are those fonts in which the width of the its letters vary. For example, the letter "i" would take up less horizontal space than the letter "w".
Monospace Fonts are those fonts in which the width of all the letters are the same. Font families are a collection of different variants of a font. For example, the Times New Roman font-family consists of regular Times New Roman, Times New Roman Bold, Times New Roman Bold Italic, and Times New Roman Italic. CSS defines five generic font families:
Serif Fonts
This generic font family consists of proportional serif font-families. Examples: Times New Roman, Garamond, Georgia etc.
Sans-serif fonts
This generic font family consists of proportional sans-serif font families. Examples: Arial, Verdana, Tahoma etc.
Monospace Fonts
This generic font family consists of monospace fonts such as Courier, Courier New etc.
Cursive Fonts
This generic font family consists of proportional fonts that look like handwriting. Examples: Comic Sans MS, Apple Chancery etc.
Fantasy fonts
This generic font family consists of those font families that are stylized and decorative and don't fall into any of the above categories. Examples: Aston-F1, Impact etc.

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