Typography glossary – A

Index

Accent Mark

Agate Line

Alignment

All Caps

Ampersand

Aperture

Apex

Apostrophe

Arm

Ascender

Accent Mark

Accent Marks are also known as diacriticals, they are the accent marks used on some characters to denote a specific pronunciation. You will find them a lot in the Spanish, French, Italian and for sure a lot more languages.

There are a lot of differen accent marks, but the most commen are:

Acute: á, é, í

Cedilla: ç Ç

Circumflex: ê Ê

Grave: è, à, ù

Tilde: ñ Ñ

Umlaut: ä Ä

Other terms: Diacritical

Agate Line

A standard unit of area used to calculate the cost of advertising space in newspapers and magazines.An agate line measures 1 1/14″ in depth (height) by one column in width.

There are 14 agate lines to a column inch . The cost of a line is indicated on the publication’s rate card. (Most newspaper columns are 2″ in width, and magazine columns measure from 2″ to 3″ or more.)

Other terms: Column Inch

Alignment

In typesetting and page layout, alignment or range, is the setting of text flow or image placement relative to a page, column (measure), table cell or tab. The type alignment setting is sometimes referred to as text alignment, text justification or type justification.

There are four basic typographic alignments:

* flush left—the text is aligned along the left margin or gutter, also known as ragged right;

* flush right—the text is aligned along the right margin or gutter,also known as ragged left;

* justified—text is aligned along the left margin, and letter- and word-spacing is adjusted so that the text falls flush with the right margin, also known as full justification;

* centered—text is aligned to neither the left nor right margin;

there is an even gap at the end of each line.

Other terms: Column Inch

All Caps

In typography, all caps (short for all capitals or all capitalized; oftenwritten as ALL CAPS) refers to text or a font in which all letters are capital letters.

All caps is usually used for emphasis. It is commonly seen in the titles on book covers, advertising, billboards, and in dramatic newspaper headlines. Short strings of words in all caps appear bolder and “louder” than mixed case. All caps is also used to indicate that a given word is an acronym.

Other terms: all uppercase

Ampersand

An ampersand (&), also commonly called an ‘and sign’, is a logogram
representing the conjunction “and”.The symbol is a ligature of the letters in et, Latin for “and”.

Other terms: &

Aperture

In typography, an aperture or counter or is an area entirely or partially
enclosed by a letter form or a symbol (the counter-space/ the hole of).

Letters containing closed counters include A, B, D, O, P, Q, R, a, b, d, g, o, p, and q. Letters containing open counters include e, s, c, h etc. The digits 0, 4, 6, 8, and 9 also possess a counter.

Other terms: counter

Apex

The point at the top of a character such as the uppercase A where the left
and right strokes meet is the apex. The apex may be a sharp point, blunt, or rounded and is an identifying feature for some typefaces

Other terms: top

Apostrophe
The apostrophe ( ’ or ‘ ) is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritic mark, in languages that use the Latin alphabet or certain other alphabets. In English it has two main functions: it marks omissions, and it assists in marking the possessives of nouns and some pronouns. The apostrophe is different from the closing single quotation mark (usually rendered identically but serving a quite different purpose), and from the similar-looking prime (which is used to indicate measurement in feet or arcminutes, and for various mathematical purposes).

Arm

The arm is the unattached horizontal strokes as in F or E. The sloping stroke in the letter K is also an arm.

Ascender

In typography, an ascender is the portion of a minuscule letter in a Latin-derived alphabet that extends above the mean line of a font. That is, the part of a lower-case letter that is taller than the font’s x-height.

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