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From: eijkhout@s41.csrd.uiuc.edu (Victor Eijkhout)
Newsgroups: comp.text,comp.text.desktop
Subject: Re: Proper usage of "font", "face", "family"
Message-ID: <1991May1.172153.6437@csrd.uiuc.edu>
Date: 1 May 91 17:21:53 GMT
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drraymond@watdragon.waterloo.edu (Darrell Raymond) writes:

>  Someone recently asked me what the difference between a font and a 
>face was.  I gave the following definitions:

>  family - a class of letterforms (e.g., Helvetica)
>  face   - a particular style of a family (e.g., Helvetica Oblique)
>  font   - a face at a particular point size (e.g., Helvetica Oblique 10)

>  Would anyone care to either confirm my definitions or point out
>other definitions?

Your terms are a bit too concise, but basically correct.
My inspiration for terminology is the following article:

Richard Southall,
Designing a new typeface with Metafont,
in: \TeX\ for scientific documentation,
Lecture Notes in Computer Science~236,
Springer Verlag, 1984.

and Richard Southall definitely *is* an authority
on typography.

Short summary:
typeface: set of lettershapes (e.g., Palatino Bold)
family of typefaces: set of typefaces that belong together (Palatino)
font: one typeface in one specific size, and (important!)
      for some specific machine (Palatino Bold on a 300dpi Postscript engine).

Victor.