:How to quickly identify a font? — Western part 1-PPT information免费ppt模版下载-道格办公
投稿
  1. JustNewsHome
  2. PPT information
  3. How to quickly identify a font? — Western part 1

How to quickly identify a font? — Western part 1

Author: daogeziyuan • • PPT information • Views 1179

Too much font 3. I am not a professional type designer. While it's impossible to instantly recognize a font name, there are a few ways to help you quickly identify a font. Below are some tips and tools that can help you find similar fonts or get more info



At work, I often encounter colleagues in the group asking for help to help identify what fonts appear in the picture.

In most cases, I can't return the name of this font in seconds. There are three reasons:

1. There are so many fonts
2. The similarity of fonts in the same style is high
3. Some fonts have the same name or "misnamed"


Is there an efficient and feasible solution?


- The reading time of this article is about 16 minutes-



It is really difficult to be a "second answer font" tool person.
?
Look at a few sets of data first:

The world's largest font company Monotype's MyFonts website contains more than 130,000 western fonts ; in the Chinese fonts, there are 12165 fonts in the Fangzheng font library, Hanyi font library< strong>2888; Adobe Fonts contains2037font families ; There are still a large number of counterfeit fonts and a small number of designer independent fonts on the Internet. In addition, there are a steady stream of new fonts appearing every year. Some people estimate that there should be no less than 200,000 fonts in the world.

Look at two multiple choice questions
▼< /section>
1. Please select Microsoft Yahei font in the picture below. (single choice)

2. Which font is Garamond. (multiple choice)

The last quiz
▼
3 . May I ask the names of these two fonts.



Reveal the answer directly:
1. (Single choice) A
A is Microsoft Yahei, B It is Fangzheng Lanting, and C is Xiaolanting. These three fonts have the same origin, have a "blood relationship", and have similar "looks" and "temperament".
2. (multiple choice) 1245
The first is Stempel Garamond, the first The second is Adobe Garamond Pro, the third is Granjon, the fourth is EB Garamond, and the fifth is Monotype Garamond.
⚠️Note that the answer to this question is by name fixed. If you are referring to digital typefaces based on Claude Garamond type samples, the answer is 1234.
< span >Because the third type Granjon is based on the movable type of Claude Garamond, while the fifth typeface, Monotype Garamond produced by Mona, is based on the movable type of Jean Jannon. It was a mistake to use the name of Garamond at that time. Other fonts based on Garamond type samples: Garamond #3, ITC Garamond, etc.

3. The names of these two fonts are Gothic
To be more specific, the first one is Century Gothic, and the second one is Old English Gothic. Obviously these are two fonts with completely different styles . Because Gothic can refer to Gothic (that is, Blackletter), and it is also the name of a new type of grotesque sans serif font.


To summarize the above:
1. There are so many fonts
2. The similarity of fonts in the same style is high
3. Some fonts have the same name or "do not match the name"




After reading this, I must have an intuitive feeling about the difficulty.
Is there an efficient and feasible solution?

“ Yes ”

The author is based on 80/ The rule of 20, that is, 80% of daily texts use 20% of high-frequency fonts, I think there are two feasible ideas:
A. Start with font style categories
A. strong>
Specific: Quickly locate the style category of the font through the visual characteristics of the font, and compare it with the classic representative fonts of this style.
B. Start with the font scene
Specific: According to the scene where the font appears, and Common high-frequency fonts in this scene are compared.
But no matter which idea has its limitations. Whether this font can be recognized depends largely on the size of the reader's font database and the iterative update of the font database.
Based on these two points, I consulted relevant materials and books, combined with the basic knowledge of fonts, visual features, and usage scenarios, summed up some tips, and organized the stones from other mountains into this series of articles. This article will introduce these two ideas in detail, and will try to let readers expand and update their own font database.

The Western chapter will be divided into 5 chapters
  • The first article (this article ) introduces some of the most basic font knowledge.

  • The second to fourth chapters introduce the classification of Western fonts in detail.

    (Second Letter Case History & Gothic, Third Serif, Fourth Noserif)
    < /li>
  • The fifth chapter introduces high-frequency fonts in the scene.
After reading these 5 articles, readers can basically build the framework system of Western fonts, and be able to do Western fonts that appear in daily life. To quickly identify a specific style category, you can even directly report the font name.
⚠︎Note: Fonts with stronger handwriting flavor such as cursive script (Script) and manual script (Manual) are not covered in this series, and will be written separately later when there is time into articles.




A simple understanding of some terms


< span >01.
Typeface & Font & Glyph
Clarify a few terms

In the daily context, the "font" we say sometimes refers to Typeface, sometimes Refers to Font, and sometimes refers to Font Family. In order to facilitate the distinction, this article refers to Typeface as font, Font as font, and Font Family as font family.
For example: [Fangzheng Lanting Black Body] is a typeface, [Founder Lanting Heilong_GBK Regular] is a typeface, which is composed of [Fangzheng Lanting Hei Family] one of the fonts.
In fact, not only in Chinese people often mix "font" and "font", but also in the English world Type, Font, Typeface are often confused, plus Typeface and Font The translation is also confusing, so we need to judge its true meaning according to the context.
The main reason why the usage of these two words is so confusing is that printing technology has improved, and some old sayings are no longer applicable. The etymology of the word "Font" is related to "melting", which emphasizes the result of melting and casting lead type. In the era of metal movable type, it refers to a set of movable type with a certain font size made uniformly according to a certain design. In modern times, it refers to a set of movable type in a computer. Digital font files.
In a word, Typeface is an abstract overall concept (it is a "design"), and font is a concrete object that this concept is restricted by several parameters ( It is a set of typefaces of a defined size and style, a subset of typeface).
Refer to the national standard and other relevant materials, and organize some confusing terms into the following table.
▼
* National Standard refers to GB/T 16964-1997 Information Technology Font Information Exchange


< span >02.
Weight & Width
The weight and width of the font family Wide


Weight | weight*

The richness of the weight is for printing.
Word weight (weight) refers to the stroke width (stroke width) relative to the height of the word. There are usually 4 to 6 weights of a certain font in a font (typeface), of which regular and bold are almost essential. (*Note: weight is translated into "weight" in the national standard GB T 16964)
▼

Different fonts have different weight names. For example, among the 8 weights of Helvetica and Boli in the picture below, there are only 5 types of weights: Light, Regular, Medium, Bold, and Black Same name, different names for the other 3.
▼


Word Width| width

Condensed is a concept of Western typesetting. It strives to accommodate more characters in a limited width without reducing the font size. It is also a common variant in sans serif fonts. It is often used in headlines, but it cannot be mixed with standard-width characters on the same line.
The extended body Extended refers to a font with increased word width, which is generally used for titles. There is also a narrower version called Compressed.
The picture below is the Classic Grotesque font family, various word weight & width, plus Italian font< /span>(to be introduced soon), together form this huge font family.
▼



03.
Italic & Oblique
Italic and Pseudo-Italic
< section>


Italic
Italic, the word means "Italian-style font", originally referring to a handwriting used in Italy. It was originally a set of independent fonts, but now it is generally a set of slanted fonts paired with the regular font Regular. (It will be mentioned later in the Western classification)

Usage

The main body of long-form readings generally uses the Roman regular style (i.e. the regular style Regular). Italian italic typesetting can play a good role in emphasizing, and at the same time, it will not disgust readers because of its frequent appearance.


Pseudo-italics | Oblique

Digital age, pseudo-italics Italic) is a style that simply obliquely deforms the outer contour of the regular body Regular. All kinds of software involving text layout come with this function.
▼

< section data-mpa-template='t' mpa-from-tpl='t' >
04.
< span >Font size
number system and point system


< span > font size is the size of the font. There are two classification methods: the number system and the point system. Modern Chinese typesetting generally uses a mixture of the point system and the number system.

number system

< section >The size unit of traditional Chinese typesetting is number. In 1858, American missionaries specified the size standard and number of Chinese characters according to the size of movable type in the United States at that time. Seven different specifications were set, and some were added later. font size.
▼
The biggest disadvantage of the size system is that there is noline type multiplerelationship between different font sizes. Some have multiple relationships. There is a multiple relationship:
• No. 1 & No. 4 & No. 6
• No. 1 & No. 2& No. 5 & No. 7
• No. 3& No. 6& No. 8
• Primary & Secondary & Primary Five

The number system is common in official documents
< span > Most people encounter the number system in their daily life when they open the Word software. Another common situation is that government-related materials are often required to use the third-number imitation Song typeface for the text.
Chinese National Standard GB/T9704-2012 "Format of Official Documents of Party and Government Organs" has a statement in "5.2.2 Font and font size" "Unless otherwise specified, the elements of the official document format generally use No. 3 imitates Song style characters. Appropriate adjustments can be made in specific situations.”
In the Simplified Chinese version of Microsoftoffice series, due to technical constraints, the font size of PowerPoint can be a multiple of 0.1pt, while Word and Excel "the font size must be a multiple of 0.5 pt", so Word and Excel cannot faithfully reproduce the font size 7 as 5.25pt but can only set it as 5.5pt. "Numbers" vary in size.
▼


Point system

The transliteration of English point, usually written as Pt (different from the pixel unit Px), commonly known as "pound". Pt is neither metric nor imperial, it is a special scale in printing, used to indicate the size of fonts.
The point system is divided into Didot's point used in Europe and American point used in the United Kingdom and the United States, that is, Didot's point used in Europe ) system and the American Pica system. American point later also gained popularity in China and Japan.
1 dido point = 1/72 ruler ≈ 0.376 mm (French Old system of length unit, 1 fathom = 6 fathoms)
1 American point = 1/12 Johnson pica ≈ 0.351 mm（Johnson pica, 83 picas = 35 cm）

The most popular contemporary It is widely used in desktop publishing software such as Adobe InDesign and Microsoft Word, and uses the similar "DTP point" (DeskTop Publishing point) is the PostScript point, which is called "big point" (big point, bp) in the LaTeX typesetting system suitable for complex formulas.
1 DTP point = 1/72 inch ≈ 0.353 mm

my country stipulates that each point is 0.35 mm. 1pt = 0.35mm
(On June 10, 1958, the Publishing Administration Bureau of the Ministry of Culture of the People’s Republic of China ordered The standard for unified movable type has been published in the "Decision on the Standardization of Movable Type and Type Models (Draft)", which directly stipulates that "each point is 0.35mm, and the height of type is 23.32mm")

▼
Conversion between number system and point system



05.
Type properties< /strong>
Graphic Terms

Name of each part of the font

▼

Baseline| Baseline
In font design, the baseline refers to the capital letter H Or that imaginary line at the bottom of the lowercase n. In order to achieve visual balance, the bottom of capital letters such as O, V, W, etc. may deliberately exceed the baseline.
▼


Cap Height | Cap Height

Capital height refers to the height from the baseline to a capital letter such as H or I. Rounded and pointed capital letters, such as S and A, will be slightly taller than the caps to achieve a visually uniform effect of size and uniformity.
▼


x-height | x-height
x-height That is, the height of the lowercase letter x, usually between 50% and 60% of the height of the capital letters. A higher x-height has an advantage in text readability.
▼


Ascender & Descender | Ascender & Descender

Ascending part refers to the upward extension of some lowercase letters such as b, d, h, k, etc., and its range exceeds the height of x. The alignment line at the top of the ascender is called the ascender line.
The descending part is the same, which refers to the part of lowercase letters such as g, j, p, q, y, etc. extending downward from the baseline. The alignment line at the bottom of the descender is called the descender line.
▼

Zi Huai| fully enclosed or semi-enclosed areas.
▼


Axis| Axis

The axis needs to be used in letter design, which is also an imaginary line, and the axis can be vertical or inclined. (The red dotted line in the figure below is the axis)
▼


serif| serif

serif Refers to the part of a paintbrush with a claw or straight shape at the beginning or end. According to the different characteristics of serifs, they are divided into many types. Serifs are an important variable in font design.
▼
Fonts with serifs are known as serif fonts. Sans in French means "none", so sanserif is "sans serif", that is, a font without serifs. (Further explanation will be given later in the classification of Western fonts)
▼


Contrast| contrast

Contrast refers to the contrast of stroke thickness, and generally refers to the proportion of vertical strokes and horizontal strokes in thickness. For example, the stroke contrast of the three types of serifs in the figure below gradually increases.
▼


Old style figures | Old style figures

Old-style numbers are also known as old-style numbers, lowercase numbers, irregular numbers or text numbers, as opposed to common alignment numbers (uppercase numbers).
The feature is that the numbers will be different in height and size (with ascending and descending parts) like lowercase Western letters. The Georgia font in the image below uses old-style numerals, while Times New Roman uses aligned numerals.
▼


06.
TYPE CLASSIFICATION
About font classification< /section>


Vox- AtypI classification system

The most widely used systematic classification of fonts was formulated by Maxmilien Vox in 1954 and established by the Association Typographique Internationale (International Typeface Association) in 1962 Revised Vox-AtypI classification. British Standards for Type Classification, published in 1967, are based on the Vox-AtypI classification with minor simplifications.
▼
Vaxes taxonomy is based on some typeface criteria (stroke weight/serif style/axis) according to the specific period in which the typeface was representative (from the 15th century to the present) /x word high, etc.) for distinction and classification. Mainly divided into three categories:Classicals,Moderns, Calligraphics< /span>.

  • Classical style font(Classicals):
    Humanist, Garrard ( Garalde), Transitional

  • Modern style font(Moderns):
    Didone, Mechanistic ), LinealsThe lineals are subdivided into Grotesque, Neo-grotesque, Geometric, sans lining Lineal Humanist.

  • calligraphy （Calligraphics）：
    Incised, Script, Script (manual)

Other classification systems

Bringhurst, the author of the famous font book Elements of Typographic Style, proposed classification according to art history, such as Baroque, Rococo, Romantic .
In the early days, French font artist Francis Thibaudeau divided fonts into four categories, Antiques (sans-serif sans serif), Egyptiennes (slab-serif flat serif), Didots, Elzevirs (triangular serifs), which are the basis of the Vox classification.

History of typography | History of typography

< span >Please watch it in horizontal screen, the original image is from www.astraestic.com.


Font Timeline
If you have a history of font development If you are interested, if you want to know more, you can browse this website https://timeline.counterspace.us



?

This article is coming to an end< /section>


The last is an overview of Western font classification
In the Western font classification section, the comprehensive font development history, each sub- The most representative fonts in the class category, and strive to concisely explain the classification and specific characteristics of Western fonts at all levels.
The most common serifs and sans-serifs in daily life refer to the Vox-AtypI classification, which are also the two major categories that this article will focus on. However, the original Vox-AtypI calligraphy categories are not completely covered, and only Carolingian lowercase, Gothic and cursive are selected for brief explanations.
Remarks: On April 27, 2021, the International Typeface Association (ATypI) officially announced the withdrawal of the "Vox-ATypI Typeface Classification System" adopted in 1962 and the cancellation of its endorsement. https://www.atypi.org/about-us/atypi-press/atypi-de-adopts-vox-atypi-typeface-classification
< p >The Vox font classification system is based on the representative fonts of a certain era, summarizing their main characteristics and then classifying the fonts. Its disadvantages are mainly reflected in two points:

1. In modern times, most fonts often contain multiple features under this classification system;

2. The development history of fonts is not linear, and some fonts with the style of a certain era were not necessarily created at that time.

So why borrow from the Vox taxonomy?

The author believes that for beginners, the Vox classification can quickly help establish a clear and large framework. With the continuous accumulation of relevant knowledge later, these two points will not affect the construction of the knowledge system. Therefore, this article still draws on the Vox classification to introduce serifs and sans serifs.



Some reference sources of this article< /section>
https://www.wikipedia.org
http:// www.smashingmagazine.com/2013/04/17/making-sense-type-classification-part-1
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2013/06 /making-sense-of-type-classification-part-2
https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/mti/classic-grotesque< /section>
https://support.office.com/zh-CN/article/Change font size-931E064E-F99F-4BA4-A1BF-8047A35552BE
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/95ArfkxsX1x-BQ8ZMtfSIQ
"Western Fonts 2: Classic Fonts and Their Expression Method "［日］Kobayashi Chapter
"Rules and Art of Font Design"［English］Karen Cheng

< /section>
?
----------- in the next This article will introduce ---------

1. Uppercase letters and lowercase letters< /span>

2. Gothic


Articles are uploaded by users and are for non-commercial browsing only. Posted by: Lomu, please indicate the source: https://www.daogebangong.com/en/articles/detail/How%20to%20quickly%20identify%20a%20font%20%20Western%20part%201.html

Like (810)
Reward 支付宝扫一扫 支付宝扫一扫
Lomu 　圆木 Columnist
48 196
single-end

Related Suggestion