  
All About Type
Movable type, developed by Johannes Gutenberg in the 15th century, has been called one of the great inventions of mankind: because of it, printed knowledge became accessible to more than just the learned few. It could be said without exaggeration that movable type is responsible for the so-called Information Age, our own age. |
Not surprisingly, early type was based exclusively on handwritten characters; it mimicked the strokes of a master scribe's pen. |
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| Type evolved quickly, but many typefaces still show vestiges of their handwritten origins. The most obvious vestige is the serif, which appears in more than half the typefaces in existence today. |
| The serif replicates the mark a pen might make as it lifted from paper at the end of a stroke. In addition, many of these serif typefaces have thick and thin strokes, such as would be produced by a pen. |
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Measurement
Type is traditionally measured in points and picas, a system similar to inches and feet: 12 points equal one pica. The increments of pica measurement are very small (6 picas or 72 points equal one inch) and are thus very appropriate for measuring type. The point size of a given font is measured from the top of the font's ascenders to the bottom of its descenders. A font's cap height is the measure of the height of an uppercase (capital) letter; its x-height is the measure of a lowercase (small) letter.
Kerning
Kerning is a process that moves optically distant letter pairs closer together than their cells would normally allow. A proportional font need not be kerned to be readable; script fonts, for example, may not be kerned. But kerning is a mark of typographic quality, and a well-made font will have kerning information built into it, so that all its optically-distant letter pairs are affected. The fonts in the Arts & Letters BOSS Fonts package have been kerned, most with over 100 kerning pairs, and some with more than 400. Arts & Letters allows you further control of kerning pairs; you can specify from 0% (no kerning) to 100% (full kerning).
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