Here we see on top a Serif font, with the serifs highlighted.

Each of these contributes to some extent to the fatigue one feels in reading large amounts of text, since poor legibility and readability lead to slow reading as well as rereading. Another is readability, which refers to the ease of reading a body of text. One challenge any typeface encounters is its legibility, or in other words, the ability to discern one character from another. Serifs are small appendages at the various tails of letters, designed to make letters more distinctive. Most of the typefaces you will see will be either serif or sans serif (often abbreviated as sans). Fonts todayĮven though typeface creation no longer involves pouring lead into a cast, we still use the term 'font foundry' to apply to the companies who make it their business to create computerized versions of typefaces. With modern printing methods, these have disappeared and have been replaced with computerized methods for creating fonts of any size and style. Historically, of course, printers had and were able to make font sets, cast from lead, which they used until they became so worn they had to be recast. A glyph is the representation of that character in some particular typeface, so that an 'A' in Garamond is a different glyph than an 'A' in DejaVu Sans, even though they are the same character. 'A' and 'B' are two different characters. A character is the letter, number, or symbol one is trying to create. It's also good not to confuse characters and glyphs. Strictly speaking, when we specify a font, it might be DejaVu Sans, Bold, and 10 pt. Then in a given document we may have 12 point or some other size of typeface. For example, in the DejaVu font family or typeface, we have Sans, Serif, Sans Condensed, and under each of these we may have a bold, or italics, or regular (often termed 'Book') style. We can consider these as 'font families'. You may have heard of names like Times, Garamond, Helvetica, Futura, DejaVu, and Droid.

In typography, there are a number of terms one runs across, and it's easy to confuse one with another.

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