Type Lexicon

How heavy the accents are against the letters. Keep them lighter than the strokes so they stay legible and do not bleed; a bold face usually wants around 70%.

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, and the Typer can widen or tighten every letter's at once.

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. In Fontane's Typer: cursor between the two letters, then ⌥← or ⌥→.

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.

Two ways a Vector-tool path can render, chosen per path in the Path panel before you draw. Fill turns a closed path into a solid shape — or a hole cut into one, the classic way to draw the counter in an 'O'. Stroke inks a constant-width outline along the path instead, at an adjustable width — the only way an open path (one that never closes back on its own start point) becomes visible ink at all, since a fill has no interior to fill without one.

One letter's own box, as a multiple of the grid's Width — an 'm' wants more room than an 'i', and until a letter has its own, wide letters are drawn cramped. Dragging the cell's right edge sets the same number; double-clicking that edge puts it back. Not to be confused with the Width slider in the grid, which moves every cell at once.

Drop in a font and it finds words or phrases that come out the exact same width — handy for lining up a type specimen without hand-picking filler text. Free, open source, fonts never leave your browser.

Upload a variable font and play with its axes live — a quick way to see what a wght or wdth range actually feels like before you commit to one in your own design.

A small toolbox of type experiments (rasterizing, rotating, and more) alongside short write-ups on things like TrueType hinting — good for poking around outside Fontane's own pipeline.