For those who visit regularly, you’ve probably noticed the use of two words: font and typeface.
Font is by far the more popular term, used by most of the population to refer to the style of letters used in a document. Typeface have a similar meaning, though it’s more used by the art crowd. The art of designing letter types is called typography. But though similar in meaning, there is a difference between a typeface and a font.
A typeface is a style. They have distinct character shapes, from ‘A’ to ‘?’, and the spacing between them is meticulously assigned. A font is a specific typeface, detailing size and style. Zenda is a typeface, Zenda size 14 is a font.
The line has gotten a little blurry now, where a bold version of a typeface is not a font, but it’s own typeface. There are now four Garamond typefaces: normal, bold, bold italic, and italic. It used to be that each style was simply a different font.