Understanding a few basic components of type and how they associate with certain technologies such as font formats is an important step that will help you more easily navigate typographic options.

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A glyph is the shape given in a particular type design to a specific character or grapheme. A character or grapheme is an abstract single unit of text, such as the letter m or the number 5, whereas a glyph is the graphical representation of the character or grapheme, such as the letter m or the number 5 in the Helvetica typeface.

A font is a set of characters, usually from a single, specific typeface, which represents a graphical design, such as the Slate Medium typeface design. The typeface can be further modified by a weight (bold, extra bold, etc.) or other characteristic (italic, condensed, etc.). For example, the Slate typeface family includes several fonts, including the Slate Light and Slate Bold selections.

Fonts are usually associated with character sets, a term that describes a digital representation of text. The representation typically involves the identification of a collection of characters. As an example, ISO 8859-1 defines an extended Latin character set that supports more than 40 Western European languages.

Every font exists in a format, which is the deliverable software description of the font. For instance, a common bitmap font format is known as BDF, and common outline fonts include the TrueType and OpenType formats. Outline fonts are scalable.

Bitmap fonts are collections of characters usually from a single typeface, stored in any particular bitmap font file format, at one point size and one resolution. For each variant of the font, there is a full set of glyph images, with every set containing an image for each character. If a font has three sizes, for example, along with bold, italic, and bold italic weights in addition to regular, there must be 12 complete sets of images.

Outline or vector fonts use Bézier curves, mathematical algorithms, and drawing instructions to describe each glyph, which enable character outlines to be scaled at any size. Scalable characters are expressed as a contour(s), or stroke(s), described by x and y coordinates on a high-resolution grid.

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