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Comment by tmoertel | Hacker News Reader

The article seems to get it wrong. It claims, for example, that Garamond 3, Adobe Garamond, and ITC Garamond are "all the same typeface, but each is a different font." They are actually different typefaces, each based on Garamond's (or Jannon's) earlier designs. The key is that they are different designs. That's why they have different names and also why nobody who specified Garamond 3 for a project would be happy to have some misguided printer swap it out for Adobe Garamond under the impression that they were "the same typeface."

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Exactly. Amazing how even the article gets it wrong. Sheesh. Never in my life have I heard "Garamond" called a single typeface.

They are all different Garamond typefaces.

While the bold, italic, display, caption, etc. versions of each are the different fonts.

wouldn't bold, italic, etc., be variants of a typeface, with a corresponding font?

UPDATE: I descended into the basement to retrieve my copy of Cleeton, Pitkin, and Cornwell's General Printing, 3rd edition, 1963. (Back then Glen U. Cleeton was the Dean of the School of Printing Management at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, better known today as Carnegie Mellon University's College of Engineering.) Anyway, one sentence from the book makes it clear:

"A font is an assortment of one size and face of type."

In other words, most faces came in multiple sizes, and each face-size pairing (that you could buy) was called a font. A.T.F. Goudy Bold, to use an example from the book, came in the following sizes: 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 18, 24, 30, 36, 42, 48, 60, 72, and 96 (all units given in typographer's points). Complicating the matter was that each font had a slight variation of the face design to accommodate the way that ink behaved on the type differently and was interpreted by the human eye differently at different sizes.

The distinction was easier before digital type. Today we have no physical object to represent a font. The font file itself might be the closest analog to pre-digital fonts but that seems to be an even more extreme view than I took in the post.

The files we have today on the computer contain font programs. These programs can be interpreted in software to yield the needed fonts (= face-size combinations) on demand.

Edited to add: But none of this changes the fact that Adobe Garamond and Garamond 3 and ITC Garamond are not the same typeface. If you wrote the original article, you should probably update it to fix this mistake before readers start getting the wrong idea.

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