Types of fonts and classification of fonts

Fonts can be classified in several ways. The most obvious distinction is between serif and sans-serif fonts. Serif fonts have marks at the end of each stroke. These marks are small counter strokes drawn perpendicular to the free ends of a character. For a given point size, sans-serifs tend to be slightly larger in body weight than serif fonts. Serif fonts can again be divided into many categories depending on the type of serif.

Fonts may also be classified into bitmapped, scalable or vector depending on the way their outlines are created. Bitmapped fonts are fine at smaller sizes but appear to be slightly distorted when scaled to larger sizes. Vector fonts are created with mathematical equations for curves and lines. They can be scaled to any size and find their rightful place in engineering drawings and other such applications. Scalable fonts occupy the highest place in a computers collection of fonts. They come in pairs of screen and printer fonts. The pairs are so designed that the formatting displayed on the screen does not get disturbed when the file is printed.

A number of fonts maybe derived from the same family of types by building different styles into them. For example, there is Arial, Arial Bold, Arial Bold Italic and so on. However, it is probably more useful to categorize type by its capabilities, whether it works best as a display face or as body text and whether it has relations with a particular kind of document.