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Understanding fonts
Weight and style
Typefaces are often available in different weights and styles. These variations modify the original
typeface so you can, for example, emphasize important words in text or highlight book titles. The
different weights and styles are designed to complement the original typeface.
Weight refers to the thickness of the lines that form the characters. Thicker lines result in darker
characters. Some words commonly used to describe the weight of a typeface are bold, medium,
light, black, and heavy.
Style refers to other typeface modifications, such as tilt or character width. Italic and oblique are
styles where the characters are tilted. Narrow, condensed, and extended are three common styles
that modify the character widths.
Some fonts combine several weight and style modifications; for example, Helvetica Narrow Bold
Italic. A group of several weight and style variations of a single typeface is called a typeface family.
Most typeface families have four variations: regular, italic, bold, and bold italic. Some families have
more variations, as the following illustration for the Helvetica typeface family shows:
Pitch and point size
The size of a font is specified as either a pitch or point size, depending on whether the font is fixed
space or proportional.
In fixed space fonts, each character has the same width. Pitch is used to specify the size of fixed
space fonts. It is a measure of the number of characters that will print in one horizontal inch of type.
For example, all 10-pitch fonts print 10 characters per inch (cpi) and all 12-pitch fonts print 12 cpi:
In proportional (or typographic) fonts, every character can have a different width. Since proportional
fonts have characters with different widths, the font size is specified in point size, not pitch. Point size
refers to the height of the characters in the font. A point is defined as 1/72 inch. The characters in a
font printed at 24 point will be twice as large as the characters in the same font printed at 12 point.