[OpenFontLibrary] Site terminology: Fonts/Typefaces

[Ben Weiner]

Hi

Dave Crossland wrote:
> At the LGM2009 Nicolas and I had some discussions about the OFLB
> terminology, and I thought I'd raise these points on the list for
> wider discussion.
>
> One of the terms was the Fonts/Typefaces distinction.
>
> Nicolas felt that the current v2 site uses the term "typefaces" too
> much (I hope you can explain here why) and I feel that since people
> who make new fonts/typefaces talk about themselves as typeface
> designers and talk about typefaces, we should "speak their language"
> as much as possible; and that the distinction between the two is quite
> a fine detail and its okay to refer to each as the other when not
> talking precisely.
>   
I agree with the foregoing, but here is an explanation.

Believe it or not, the use of 'Typeface' was very carefully considered, 
at least when we were thinking about the style and editorial tone of the 
OFLB. I think we largely succeeded in carrying our decisions through to 
the site pages and the new wiki docs.

'Typeface' refers to all the members of a visually related font family, 
so the ccHost 'upload' page became a 'Typeface record' because users are 
encouraged to produce multiple weights - a family, in other words - and 
upload them to the same typeface record.

Typically the members of the family (each of which would traditionally 
have been called a 'fount' or 'font') are regular/Roman, bold, italic, 
etc. There could be different scripts in the family too; as long as they 
share a common visual style, and by implication a common origin.

When we talk about 'fonts' on OFLB we should be referring to the files 
in which the typeface family members are encoded. Font files can now 
contain any number of typeface family members, so perhaps these 
multi-member files should be called 'typeface files' instead.

Cheers,
Ben

-- 
Ben Weiner | http://readingtype.org.uk/about/contact.html