O Terms
Oblique Roman type that has been artificially slanted to look italic. The opposite of true italic.
OpenType Just in case you didn't think Type 1 and TrueType were enough, Adobe and Microsoft (with support from Apple, Netscape and others) have gotten together and come up with OpenType, mostly to answer font problems on the World Wide Web. The OpenType specification allows for the compression, embedding and decompression of font information so it can easily travel with a document and display properly on any computer platform-sort of where TrueType and Type 1 put aside their differences and unite for the common good of all documents. Don't worry-your current fonts should be compatible with the new format, which will take a while to catch on and be supported.
Orphan When you're setting a book and the first line of a new paragraph falls at the bottom line of a page, or the last line of a paragraph winds up at the top of a page (also called a page widow). Either way, they're to be avoided.
Outline This is the part of the type software that actually creates the printed characters. It is, technically, just a description of the type's outline-it would take up too much space to describe all the solid stuff in between-that's done in the Postscript interpreter during printing.
P Terms
Parts of a Letter
- Apex: The point where two diagonal strokes meet, as in the top of the uppercase A or M.
- Arm: Horizontal strokes on letters like T or E.
- Bar: The cross horizontal piece connecting two strokes.
- Beak A serif at the end of a horizontal stroke.
- Bowl: Round parts of letters like P, B and the upper part of g.
- Counter: The enclosed part of a letter such as the P or p.
- Ear: The little part that sticks out to the right of the lowercase g.
- Eye: The enclosed part of the lowercase e.
- Link: The connecting line of a lowercase g between the loop and the upper bowl.
- Loop: The lower part of the g, also called the tail.
- Serif The fine line finishing off the end of the stroke. From the Dutch schreef which originally meant "borderline."
- Spur The little stick-out part of some letters like G or t.
- Stress The implied angle between the thinnest parts of a curved letter. Point of maximum stress is the thickest part of curved letters like O or D.
- Stroke or Stem How everyone describes the main elements of the letter.
- Tail A stroke extending below the baseline, like the lowercase j or uppercase Q. Sometimes called a leg.
- Vertex: Where two downward diagonal strokes cross, as in a M or W.
Penalty Copy Not used enough as a term any more, but should be. This is any original copy that is difficult to work with-like handwritten, badly faxed or otherwise messy pages. Once typesetters charged extra-a penalty-for this hard-to-read stuff. Now could certainly apply to poorly prepared text files.
Pi Characters You know this to be all the odd symbols and special characters that aren't numbers, symbols or letters. But did you know the term originally described what happened when metal type got all mixed together so as to be unusable?
Pibble Of slightly dubious origin, but the only known word to describe when a word is set to look like what it says.
Pilcrow You know it as the paragraph symbol
Pixel Smallest point displayed on a computer screen (most screens are 72 pixels per inch). Comes from picture element.
Point System We measure type in points, thanks to Pierre Simon Fournier and F. Didot, who developed the standard in the 19th Century. In their Didot Point System, 12 points equal one cicero. The British/American version (proposed by Nelson Hawks in 1878) is based on the Pica-which is also 12 points, or 4.233 millimeters, but is slightly smaller than a Didot Point. The point size of a type (in modern times) is determined by measuring the distance from the ascent line (top of the capitals) to the descent line (bottom most descender). And to confuse things even more, many Europeans now measure type in millimeters (1 mm equals 2.85 points).
Printer Font Same as the outline font. It's the information the printer needs to construct a font for printing. Different than the bitmap font.