What are fonts?
Fonts are collections of letters, numbers, punctuation, and other symbols used to render text or other related materials. Font refers to the physical property such as a case or drawer of metal or wood type or a digital file. Historically, a font referred to a specific font style and point size- i.e. LTC Cloister Bold Italic – 12 pt. However, with digital fonts, the ability to scale or resize fonts within applications diminishes this distinction, although, certain font styles are designed to be used at an optimal range of point sizes.
What are typefaces?
The words typeface and font are often used interchangeably, however, typeface is a more general term that refers to a specific design but may be composed of multiple fonts.
What can I use fonts for?
Fonts can be used for a wide array of purposes such as everyday correspondence, newsletters, general design and artwork, advertising and branding uses, clothing and merchandise manufacturing, TV and film titles, signage, retail packaging, websites, apps and ePubs- really anything that makes use of text one way or another. Please note that these uses are for example only and may require a special license. See Licensing and Usage for more information.
What are glyphs?
Glyphs are commonly associated with symbols or pictograms. However in the age of digital type, a glyph represents the individual components that make up of a font, or the particular graphical representation of a character. A basic font with a full ASCII character set can have a maximum of 256 glyphs, whereas a full-featured OpenType font can contain thousands of glyphs. The term character is often used interchangeably, but refers to the general symbol of a letter, numbers, punctuation as well as non-symbol, control characters such as space, return, tab and not the particular graphical representation.
What is an alphanumeric character vs an illustrative element?
Fonts can contain a wide array of glyphs or characters. Alphanumeric glyphs are the Aa-Zz, 0-1 characters. Most fonts are generally one style of text or another such as serif, sans serif, script, slab, blackletter or other. In addition to the alphanumeric characters, these fonts normally contain other glyphs such as punctuation marks, accented characters and common symbols that comprise of the ASCII keyboard standard. Illustrative elements are the pictorial glyphs often referred to as extras, ornaments or dingbats. These glyphs can often be included within fonts that contain alphanumeric characters, but more commonly are sold as a separate font, often with the word ‘extras’ or ‘ornaments’ in the title.
What is Opentype format?
OpenType is a cross-platform font format that was created by the combined efforts of Microsoft and Adobe. In addition to allowing you to use the same font file on your Mac or PC, using OpenType means you no longer have to make the sometimes confusing decision between whether to use TrueType or PostScript. The basic OpenType format offers more or less the same features as PostScript and TrueType formats (which can only contain a character set with a maximum of 256 glyphs.)
The OpenType format, however, is also capable of supporting expanded character sets containing thousands of characters or glyphs. These fonts are often designated as “Pro” on our website and require specific applications including Adobe Creative Suite to access the expanded character sets and Opentype features such as ligatures, alternates, small caps, swashes, special numerals, historical forms and ornaments. In addition to providing layout features for enhanced typography, OpenType offers support for greater linguistic support. Pro fonts often include a full range of accented characters to support central and eastern European languages, such as Turkish and Polish. Some Pro fonts also contain Cyrillic and Greek character extensions in the same font.
Are these fonts compatible with my operating system?
All Burntilldead OpenType fonts are compatible with Macintosh, Linux, and Windows operating systems. Users with older operating systems such as MacOS Classic and Windows 95/98/ME/NT 4.0, can install these fonts, but require Adobe’s Type manager (ATM). Burntilldead Studio does not offer support for installation that requires the use of ATM.