Typography

Typography

Typography is the manipulation of text on a webpage. Typography is important because it helps make things easier and more fluent to read on a webpage. Through the use of multiple fonts, font sizes, font colors, etc. you can make your webpage come to life and look visually appealing to your visitors.

But the <font> tag is slowly fading away from use, and this is largely due to the use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Because one can use various kinds of style sheets in a single page, one can just use them to defint font settings and reduce the amount of coding necessary for your page. It is much simpler to code a single .css style sheet and link it to your page to change all the occurrences than to hunt down multiple <font> tags in your code and adjust the properties of each one individually.

In Review:

1. Times, Courier, Arial, Geneva, Verdana, Serif, Georgia, Sans Serif, Helvetica, and Mono.

2. <font>

3. Georgia and Verdana

4. A font family is a group of fonts that are similar, but slightly varied.

5a. x-height - standard for the height of the lowercase letters.

5b. baseline - line that the bottom of the letters are lined up on.

5c. ascenders - parts of a font which go above the x-height line.

5d. descenders - parts of a font which go below the baseline.

5e. leading - the vertical space between 2 lines of type.

5f. kerning - the space between individual letters.

5g. tracking - the spacing between all letters in a line.

5h. scale - used to reset the height and width of text.

6. Serif fonts have what's called a serif stroke on the letters, and Sans Serif fonts do not have this. An example of a serif font would be Courier, while an example of a sans serif font would be Verdana.