D Terms
Dead Font Formats Before Adobe Type 1 and TrueType became the winning standards in electronic type formats, others made a valiant effort:
- MoreFonts from Micrologic never gained much ground on the Windows platform.
- Nimbus Q from the Digital Type Corporation was developed by URW in Germany-it made its way into a few Windows programs before its ultimate demise.
- Speedo was a font format from Bitstream that was used on the Windows platform prior to the widespread adoption of TrueType.
- Type 3 was the poor man's version of Type 1 fonts before Adobe opened up their specification for others to use.
If you have any of these formats today, relegate them to the trash where they belong.
Descender Depth The opposite of ascender height, it refers to the distance between the bottom of the lowercase x and the southern-most point of descending characters like g or y.
Descriptors For a brief time it seemed like fonts were headed in this direction, where a master font file existed on your system, which would then be "modified" on the fly into a specific type design by descriptor files (containing specific design guidelines). Efficiency of space and flexibility in distribution was the point here. It appears that most of these systems have lost favor.
Dieresis When you need to help someone pronounce coöperate, it's what appears over the second o. Same as the German umlaut, by the way. See accent marks.
Dingbats You know these odd characters thanks to ITC Zapf Dingbats and WingDings. But did you know that fun typographic ornaments are sometimes called flubdubs? Others still insist on sorts, though I'm told in hot metal days that referred to any character that didn't have a regular place in the type drawer or could not be accessed by a key on the Linotype machine.
Dipthong Not something for walking on the beach, but rather the ligature formed by two vowels coming together to form one character.
Discretionary Hyphen Sometimes called a soft hyphen, it's really an "optional" word break that you put in to let the program know that if a break needs to be made, this is where you want it to occur (usually by typing command + -). If the text is reformatted and the line endings change, a discretionary hyphen goes away automatically, as opposed to a hard hyphen, which stays until it is deleted. You should almost always use discretionary hyphens--you get into less trouble that way.