For example the letter “s” is a character which is reified into several different glyphs: “S”, “s”, “ s”, “ß”, long-s, etc. CharacterĪ character is a Platonic ideal reified into at least one glyph. This is the native font format for fonts with PostScript Type2 charstrings. CFFĬompact Font Format is most commonly used within OpenType PostScript fonts, but is a valid font format even without a SFNT wrapper. See also X-height, Ascender, Descender, Overshoot, Baseline. The height of a capital letter above the baseline (a letter with a flat top like “I” as opposed to one with a curved one like “O”). No modern writing system uses this method (nor does OpenType have any support for it). Often, the right-to-left glyphs would be mirrors of the left-to-right ones. Early alphabets (Old Canaanite, the very early Greek writings, and, surprisingly, fuþark) used this. Writing “as the ox plows” that is, alternating between left-to-right and right-to-left writing directions. BowlĪ (modern~1911) Chinese (Mandarin) alphabet used to provide phonetic transliteration of Han ideographs in dictionaries. Bold is one of the few LGC styles that translate readily to other scripts. The stems of the glyphs are wider than in the normal font, giving the letters a darker impression. SSP: Supplementary Special-purpose Plane (0圎0000-0圎FFFF)Ī common font style.SIP: Supplementary Ideographic Plane (0x20000-0x2FFFF).SMP: Supplementary Multilingual Plane (0x10000-0x1FFFF).

These contain most of the ordinary characters in the modern world. The Unicode standard contains an algorithm for laying out Bidi text.Īny of various type families based on medieval handwriting. Things get even more complex with nested quotations. This is a section of text which contains both left-to-right and right-to-left scripts - English text quoting Arabic, for example. Bézier curve or Bézier splinesīézier curves are described in detail in the Bézier section of the main manual. See also X-height, Cap-height, Ascender, Descender, Overshoot.

The BASE and bsln tables allow you to specify how the baselines of different scripts should be aligned with respect to each other. In CJK scripts there is also a vertical baseline usually in the middle of the glyph. In Indic scripts most letters descend below the baseline. The baseline will probably be in a different place for different scripts. The baseline is the horizontal line on which the (Latin, greek, cyrillic) letters sit. ATSUIĪpple’s advanced typographical system. Its precise meaning in modern typography seems to vary with different definers. In traditional typography the ascent of a font was the distance from the top of a block of type to the baseline. Used to specify mark-to-base and cursive GPOS subtables. See also X-height, Cap-height, Descender, Overshoot, Baseline. AscenderĪ stem on a lower case letter which extends above the x-height. The piece of the letter r that hangs off to the right. Includes contextual substitutions, ligatures, kerning, etc. Apple Advanced TypographyĪpple’s extension to basic TrueType fonts. See also: abjad, abugida, syllabary and the relevant Wikipedia article. AlphabetĪ writing system where there are glyphs for all phonemes - consonants and vowels alike - and (in theory anyway) all phonemes in a word will be marked by an appropriate glyph. The distance between the start of this glyph and the start of the next glyph. See also: alphabet, abjad, syllabary and the relevant Wikipedia article. All vowels other than the default will be marked by either diacritics or some other modification to the base consonant.Īn abugida differs from a syllabary in that there is a common theme to the images representing a syllable beginning with a given consonant (that is, the glyph for the consonant), while in a syllabary each syllable is distinct even if two start with a common consonant.Īn abugida differs from an abjad in that vowels (other than the default) must be marked in the abugida. In most abugidas there are independent glyphs for the consonants, and each consonant is implicitly followed by a default vowel sound. The Indic writing systems are probably the best known abugidas. AbugidaĪn abugida is somewhere in between an alphabet and a syllabary. See also: alphabet, abugida, syllabary and the relevant Wikipedia article. Ancient Phoenician had nothing but consonants and is a “pure” abjad. Abjad is the technical term for the type of writing system used by Semitic languages (Hebrew, Arabic, etc.), where there are glyphs for all the consonants but the reader must be prepared to guess what vowel to add between two consonants.īoth Hebrew and Arabic have optional vowel marks and are called “impure” abjads.

Fontforge glossary