[OpenFontLibrary] Site terminology: Fonts/Typefaces

[Liam R E Quin]

On Tue, 2009-05-12 at 23:27 +0100, Ben Weiner wrote:
[...]
> 'Typeface' refers to all the members of a visually related font family,
This is usually called "typeface family"... where a typeace is a design
and a font is an implementation of that design, whether in metal, wood,
stone, or software...

> Typically the members of the family (each of which would traditionally 
> have been called a 'fount' or 'font') are regular/Roman, bold, italic, 
> etc.

Do you have a reference here for such usage?  Benton at ATF invented the
term "family" to describe roman + italic + bold (and, later, bold
italic) but a fount was always a single typeface in metal as I had
understood the literature, e.g. Updike, Tracy, etc.


> When we talk about 'fonts' on OFLB we should be referring to the files 
> in which the typeface family members are encoded.
100% agreed here.

>  Font files can now 
> contain any number of typeface family members, so perhaps these 
> multi-member files should be called 'typeface files' instead.
Please don't do that -- US and UK law explicitly uses the terms
"typeface" and "font" as I have described, from my non-lawyer reading;
calling fonts typeface files might weaken their protection.

Liam



-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
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