Serif: "A fine line finishing off the main strokes of a letter, as at the top and bottom of M." --Dictionary.Com
A
serif font has little points or crosses at the ends. The points date back
to the beginning of writing, as the scribes who wrote had trouble ending
their characters precisely. Thus, they added little points to the end of
characters to cover up this problem. Over time, this led to a convention
that the points, or serifs, were always included. An example of a serif
font is Times New Roman.
In
the early part of the twentieth century, typographers experimented with
dropping the serif's. At first it was felt that these new fonts, called
sans-serif fonts, were grotesque and ugly. However, in the 1920s, the new,
conservative cultures of Russia and Germany desired to create a new kind
of font which was more to their tastes. Thus, sans-serif became popular
and were considered bold and daring. Examples of sans-serif fonts are
Arial, Helvetica and Verdana.
Serif fonts are generally easier to read in print, as the serif's make the characters easier to identify. The old typographers spent much time proving this by actual experiment. However, a proviso is that sans-serif fonts look better on lower-resolution computer screens. They are simply easier to read.
A common convention is to use a serif font for the body of your document and a sans-serif font for the headings.
Older
printers, teletypes and monitors began with fixed-width fonts. This means
each character was exactly the same width. This was because that was all
the technology of the time could produce.
This
is distinctly different than virtually all printed material. Look closely
at a page from a magazine or book, and you will see that the distance
between the characters differs from character to character. Thus, the
horizontal space required by an "i" is different than that required by an
"m".
As monitors and printers became more sophisticated, they started to support variable width characters. Nowadays, fixed-width characters are only used by programmers (for their code) and reporting.
Kerning: "To adjust space between (characters) in typeset text." --Dictionary.Com
A step up
from variable-width characters is called kerning. This means the width of
each character is adjusted depending upon the characters to either side.
Thus, the characters are shoved together as much as they can.
Why is
this done? It tends to make the text on the page look more professional
and more can fit on a page. It is, however, much more difficult for
software and hardware to support kerning. In addition, the font software
must be very sophisticated.
In general, kerning is done on material that is intended to be printed. It is not done by web browsers or many word processors.
Unless otherwise noted, all photos and text is Copyright © Richard G Lowe, Jr.