Meet the Fonts!

A font is the complete character set of one type style, e.g., Helvetica Bold or Palatino Italic. A font family is all the related fonts. The Garamond family includes Garamond Roman, Garamond Italic, and Garamond Bold, among others. Type is further grouped by historical classification.

Type is specified by font and size. Each font can be set to virtually any point size. All the fonts displayed below are 36 points. As you can see, they have different optical sizes. Each also has its own personality. Here are descriptions of some fonts as representatives of their classification.

Start with Oldstyle.