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font

 or typeface or type family

The term font commonly refers to a type family such as Bodoni or Helvetica, which includes …

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Assortment or set of type (alphanumeric characters used for printing), all of one coherent style. Before the advent of computers, fonts were expressed in cast metal that was used as a template for printing. Fonts are now stored as digitized images that can be scaled and otherwise modified for printing on electronic printers or digital phototypesetters. Fonts typically include the normal typeface (roman) as well as italic, bold, bold italic, and sometimes extra-bold versions. See also typesetting, typography.

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A set of type characters of a particular typeface design and size. Each typeface, such as Times Roman, Helvetica and Arial, is typically made available in four variations: normal weight, bold, italic and bold italic. Thus, for bitmapped fonts, which are fully generated ahead of time, four fonts would be required for each point size of the typeface. For scalable fonts, which are generated in any point size on the fly, only four fonts would be required for each typeface.

Font Storage
Fonts mostly reside in the computer's hard disk as "soft fonts." However, with PostScript fonts, a basic set is built into the printer along with the PostScript rasterizing engine. In the early days, plug-in cartridges were common (see font cartridge). See typeface, bitmapped font, scalable font, TrueType and PostScript fonts.

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font - A set of glyphs (images) representing the characters from some particular character set in a particular size and typeface. The image of each character may be encoded either as a bitmap (in a bitmap font) or by a higher-level description in terms of lines and areas (an outline font). There are several different computer representations for fonts, the most widely known are Adobe Systems, Inc.'s PostScript font definitions and Apple's TrueType. Window systems can display different fonts on the screen and print them.