Digital typography

Digital typography is the design and use of type through digital technologies, including systems that render text on screens and in digital documents. It combines letterform design with software, encoding, and display constraints.

Font rasterization: The conversion of font outlines into pixel patterns for display or printing. It turns digital letter outlines into the pixels seen on a screen.
Typeface: A coordinated design of letters, numerals, and other characters with shared visual features. Digital fonts encode and deliver typeface designs for use in software.
Responsive typography: Typography that adapts its size, spacing, or layout to different screen dimensions and viewing conditions. It keeps text hierarchy and readability coherent across changing viewport sizes.
Metal type: Physical type cast from metal sorts and arranged by hand for printing. Its fixed physical sorts contrast with the scalable, software-defined forms of digital type.
OpenType: A font format that supports advanced typographic features and complex writing systems. Its tables encode glyph outlines, substitutions, and positioning used in modern digital fonts.
Font: A digital or physical resource that provides glyph designs and metrics for text. Digital typography relies on font files to supply glyphs and their layout measurements.
Variable font: A font file that supports continuous variation along design axes such as weight or width. Variable fonts let digital interfaces tune typography without loading separate files for every style.
Phototypesetting: A printing method that composes type by projecting characters onto photographic material. It preceded digital composition but lacked the same direct manipulation of encoded font data.
Unicode: A character-encoding standard that assigns code points to characters across writing systems. Digital text uses Unicode characters that fonts map to visible glyphs.
Glyph: A visual form used to represent a character or part of a character in text. A single encoded character can produce different glyphs depending on script and context.

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