A small glossary of type-design terms, written for someone drawing their first font rather than someone who already has a shelf of typography books.
The invisible line every letter sits on — the flat bottom of an 'a', 'e', or 'x'. Descenders (the tail of a 'g' or 'y') hang below it.
How tall lowercase letters are, measured from the baseline to the top of an 'x' — the single biggest factor in how big or small a typeface reads at the same point size.
How tall capital letters stand above the baseline. Usually close to, but not exactly, the height of an ascender.
The parts of a lowercase letter that reach above the x-height (the stem of a 'b', 'd', 'h', 'k', 'l') or below the baseline (the tail of a 'g', 'j', 'p', 'q', 'y').
The enclosed or partially enclosed space inside a letter — the hole in an 'o', the two spaces in a 'B'. Draw it too small and the letter clogs up at small sizes.
The curved stroke that encloses a counter — the round part of a 'b', 'p', or 'o'.
Where a stroke ends without joining another stroke — the tip of a 'c' or the foot of an 'l'. Can be cut straight, angled, or rounded (a 'ball terminal').
The difference between a letter's thickest and thinnest strokes. High contrast (thin hairlines, thick stems) reads as formal or calligraphic; low contrast (strokes all one width) reads as a monoline pen or a technical typeface.
Serif: the small finishing strokes at the ends of letters (like the feet on the letters in a newspaper headline). Sans-serif: no finishing strokes, just the bare stroke (like this website's own UI type).
The square a font's glyphs are designed inside — historically the width of a capital 'M'. Fontane, like most modern fonts, uses 1000 units per em: a coordinate system every glyph's outline is measured in, independent of the point size someone eventually sets the text at.
The empty space to the left and right of a glyph's ink, inside its own advance width — what actually keeps neighboring letters from touching. Fontane's Grid View lets you drag these directly as guide lines.
How far the cursor moves after typing a glyph — its ink plus both sidebearings. Get it wrong and letters either collide or drift apart.
A manual spacing adjustment for one specific pair of letters — classically 'AV' or 'To', where the default spacing looks too loose because the letter shapes interlock. Applied pair by pair, not to the whole font.
A uniform spacing adjustment applied to a whole run of text at once (tightening a headline, loosening small caps) — set by whoever is using the font, not baked into it the way kerning is.
One drawn shape in a font — not quite the same as a 'character'. The character 'a' might have several glyphs behind it: a base form, a bold alternate, a swash variant, each its own outline.
Two or more letters redrawn as a single joined glyph — classically 'fi' or 'fl', where the dot of the 'i' would otherwise collide with the hook of the 'f'.
A second (or third) drawn version of a letter, available as a substitute for the default — a different lowercase 'a', a swashy capital, a single-story 'g'. The letter still means the same thing; it just looks different when chosen.
An automatic rule baked into a font that swaps in a different glyph depending on what's next to it — so the same letter doesn't look identically stamped every time it repeats. The mechanism itself lives in the font file, not in whatever app displays the text.
A named, switchable behavior built into a font file — ligatures, stylistic alternates, and contextual alternates are each their own feature, off by default in most apps unless the user (or the app) turns them on.
Instructions embedded in a font that nudge its outlines onto the pixel grid at small sizes, so curves don't blur or stems don't vanish on a low-resolution screen. Mostly a solved problem on today's high-DPI displays — modern fonts lean on that instead of manual hinting.
A typeface is the overall design — 'Fontane Sketch'. A font is one specific weight/style file of it — 'Fontane Sketch Bold' is a font, part of the Fontane Sketch typeface.
How thick a typeface's strokes are — Light, Regular, Bold, and everything between. Named after the OpenType wght axis, which runs roughly 100 (thinnest) to 900 (heaviest).
How condensed or expanded a typeface is horizontally, independent of its weight — the OpenType wdth axis. A Condensed Bold and a Regular Bold share a weight but not a width.
An oblique is the upright letterforms mechanically slanted. A true italic is redrawn — different letter construction, not just a slant (a lowercase italic 'a' is often a completely different shape from its upright counterpart). The OpenType slnt axis technically produces an oblique; a true italic needs its own drawn master.
A single font file that contains a continuous design space — drag a Weight slider and every glyph interpolates live, instead of switching between separate Light/Regular/Bold files. Powered by axes like wght, wdth, and slnt.
A specific, labeled point inside a variable font's design space — 'Bold' might just mean 'wght 700' with every other axis at its default. A static font (like each file in a Light/Regular/Bold export) is the same idea frozen into its own independent file.
The raw pen path you actually draw — before any brush, nib, or pressure envelope turns it into a filled letterform. Fontane keeps the skeleton and the applied style as two separate layers, which is what makes swapping brushes on an already-drawn alphabet possible.
Fontane's term for a font's traceable drawing history — evidence that a glyph was actually hand-drawn over real time, rather than converted or generated. Checked before a font can publish to the Marketplace.