What About Fonts?

Serif and Sans-Serif

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.

Fixed and variable width fonts

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

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.