
They're not fonts - kingsidharth
http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/theyre-not-fonts
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blhack
I absolutely hate this sort of pedantry. This is fine if your'e sitting around
joking around with your fellow designer friends, but I see this used all the
time to try and make people feel bad about themselves because they're
"stupid".

And actually, "what font did you use" _is_ correct you arrogant jackass, at
least using the definition that you gave. Or are you designing PDFs using a
letterpress?

~~~
kingsidharth
That's like saying. What source code you're using when you're using complied
software.

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cschep
I wonder if there is anything that feels this pedantic when I'm trying to
carefully explain it to someone else. This is such a useless distinction in my
mind.

Alas.. someone somewhere is calling their computer a hard drive and that would
cause me to shudder. :)

~~~
RandallBrown
Try explaining to someone the difference between a gigabyte and a gibibyte.

~~~
cschep
You're braver than I. :)

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michaelpinto
The author is 100% correct -- it's amazing to me that so many techies who
should be detail oriented get this wrong:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Font>

"In typography, a font (also fount) is traditionally defined as a quantity of
sorts composing a complete character set of a single size and style of a
particular typeface."

Why is this important? Now that typefaces are embedded in the web we'll see
the typography become more and more sophisticated. So it's important for
techies to really learn the language of typography. Also since we're seeing
amazing advances in screen resolution we can really start to show several
weights of a typeface at a very small size.

In fact my bet is that as we see resolution increase we'll start to embrace
vastly improved typography. In the old days the cut of a typeface at 72 points
was different than the same typeface at 12 points -- so the typeface wasn't
just auto-scaling up and down in size by stretching it. My bet is that we'll
see a real revolution in the next few years in this area.

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charliepark
A better phrasing was used by someone on a panel at SXSW (Frank Chimero,
perhaps? Jason Santa-Maria?). Anyway, they were conveying the idea that a font
is a digital representation of a typeface, and they used this analogy:

Song : MP3 :: Typeface : Font

I agree, though, that making a big deal out of people getting it wrong is a
sign of insecurity and pretentiousness.

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pornel
In Polish the term for _cast metal sort_ (czcionka) has become synonymous with
both _font_ and _typeface_.

I suspect the reason is the same as with _font_ in English — it's the only
term that Word (and its predecessors) used for everything font/typeface
related.

The battle is lost.

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davvid
They're not fonts... and that's why you have no friends :P

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georgieporgie
Given that -- unless you're literally cutting and pasting things together --
you require a corresponding _font_ to create something in a given _typeface_ ,
I don't see any point in pedantically distinguishing between them.

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raz0r
ZOMG! Them horrors. Someone is calling something wrong names. Never seen that
coming.

