Windows® 98 Unleashed

Fontamentals, Part I: The Architecture of Characters

Back in the days when DOS dinosaurs dominated the PC landscape, people rarely had to pay much attention to the characters that made up correspondence and memos. Outside of a measly few effects (such as making words bold), there wasn't a whole lot you could do with individual letters and symbols, so they became mere foot soldiers in any given war of words.

The advent of the graphical interface changed all that, however. With Windows, it suddenly became a snap to alter the size and shape of letters and numbers and therefore impart an entirely different atmosphere to writings. The engine behind this newfound typographical prowess was, of course, the font.

I always like to describe fonts as the ...