出典(authority):フリー百科事典『ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』「2016/01/20 06:16:24」(JST)
フォント (font) は、本来「同じサイズで、書体デザインの同じ活字の一揃い」を指す言葉だが、現在ではコンピュータ画面に表示したり、紙面に印刷(書籍など)したりするために利用できるようにした書体データを意味している。金属活字の時代から書体の世界に関わっている者からは、データとしてのフォントはデジタルフォント (digital font) として区別して呼ばれることもある。
書体という言葉は、現在ではフォント(の使用ライセンス数)を数える単位としても用いられるが、ここでは分けて考えることとする。(書体参照)
それぞれの文字の幅が統一されているフォントを等幅フォント、そうでないフォントをプロポーショナルフォントと呼ぶ。一般にプロポーショナルフォントの方が自然で読みやすいとされるが、初期のデジタルフォントでは技術的制約から等幅フォントが多用された。詳細についてはプロポーショナルフォントを参照。
ドットの組み合わせで文字を表現したフォントで、コンピュータの初期には、容量の節減および描画速度の確保のためビットマップフォントを利用した。日本語文字においては、当時はフォントを全て記憶するには記憶容量 (RAM) が少なかった上に、かといって逐次必要なフォントをフロッピーディスクドライブから読み出すのも速度的に問題があるので、漢字ROMにビットマップフォントを格納して運用されることが多かった。現在でも、スケーラブルフォントからビットマップフォントを生成するとき、文字が小さいと線間の調整ができずに潰れて読めなくなってしまうことが多いために、小さな文字ではビットマップフォントが使われることもある[1]が、フォントヒンティングで対応することもある。
8ドットサイズの英字、カタカナ文字が利用できるフォント。400ラインのディスプレイの普及や、漢字が扱えるようになり、16ドットサイズのフォントがコンピュータに搭載されるようになった。印刷では、ワープロ(専用機)を中心に一部で24ドット、48ドットなどのフォントも利用され始め、データサイズの増大からスケーラブルフォントへ移行していった。
線の位置や形、長さなどで文字の形を作るため、拡大縮小しても、ビットマップフォントのように字形に影響がない。そのためスケーラブル、拡縮自由などと冠される。拡縮自由なフォントとしては、ストロークフォントやアウトラインフォントがある。
文字の形状を、中心線だけの情報で保持するフォント形式。線の太さなどは扱わないためデータ量は軽く、かつ出力デバイスの解像度に依存しない。CADシステムやプロッタなどで使用される。なお、「ストロークフォント」という言葉は、文字をストロークごとに分解して管理する作成・生成・管理システム(それをフォントプログラムとして実装した例としてはダイナコムのストロークベーステクノロジなど)や、派生した形式(一つの骨格からファミリーを生成する技術など)を指すこともある。アルファブレンドの三次ベジェ曲線で構成され筆順を持つストロークフォントはASPで利用可能である。
文字の輪郭線の形状を、関数曲線の情報として持つフォント形式。実際に画面や紙に出力する際には、解像度に合わせてビットマップ状に塗り潰すラスタライズが必要になる。
日本ではワープロやDTPを中心にアウトラインフォントの利用が普及し、WYSIWYGが普及したために、コンピュータ画面でもスケーラブルラインフォントの利用が広がった。(当初のDTPは、プリントアウトにはアウトラインフォントを使い、画面表示にはビットマップフォントを使用するワークフローが基本だった)
ビットマップの埋め込みができる形式も多い。
最高裁判所判例 | |
---|---|
事件名 | 著作権侵害差止等請求本訴、同反訴事件 |
事件番号 | 平成10(受)332 |
平成12年09月07日 | |
判例集 | 民集 第54巻7号2481頁 |
裁判要旨 | |
印刷用書体が著作権法二条一項一号にいう著作物に該当するためには、従来の印刷用書体に比して顕著な特徴を有するといった独創性及びそれ自体が美術鑑賞の対象となり得る美的特性を備えていなければならない。 | |
最高裁判所第一小法廷 | |
裁判長 | 井嶋一友 |
陪席裁判官 | 遠藤光男 藤井正雄 大出峻郎 町田顯 |
意見 | |
意見 | 全員一致 |
参照法条 | |
テンプレートを表示 |
一 著作権法二条一項一号は、「思想又は感情を創作的に表現したものであって、文芸、学術、美術又は音楽の範囲に属するもの」を著作物と定めるところ、印刷用書体がここにいう著作物に該当するというためには、それが従来の印刷用書体に比して顕著な特徴を有するといった独創性を備えることが必要であり、かつ、それ自体が美術鑑賞の対象となり得る美的特性を備えていなければならないと解するのが相当である。この点につき、印刷用書体について右の独創性を緩和し、又は実用的機能の観点から見た美しさがあれば足りるとすると、この印刷用書体を用いた小説、論文等の印刷物を出版するためには印刷用書体の著作者の氏名の表示及び著作権者の許諾が必要となり、これを複製する際にも著作権者の許諾が必要となり、既存の印刷用書体に依拠して類似の印刷用書体を制作し又はこれを改良することができなくなるなどのおそれがあり(著作権法一九条ないし二一条、二七条)、著作物の公正な利用に留意しつつ、著作者の権利の保護を図り、もって文化の発展に寄与しようとする著作権法の目的に反することになる。また、印刷用書体は、文字の有する情報伝達機能を発揮する必要があるために、必然的にその形態には一定の制約を受けるものであるところ、これが一般的に著作物として保護されるものとすると、著作権の成立に審査及び登録を要せず、著作権の対外的な表示も要求しない我が国の著作権制度の下においては、わずかな差異を有する無数の印刷用書体について著作権が成立することとなり、権利関係が複雑となり、混乱を招くことが予想される。
—民集 第54巻7号2481頁
この節の加筆が望まれています。 |
ユニバーサルデザインフォント(UDフォント)とは、誰にでも読みやすいようなデザインのフォントのことである。例えば数字の「6」、「9」や「8」、「3」はフォントによっては非常に判別がしづらい。このような読みづらい文字を判別しやすいようにしたのがユニバーサルフォントである。
[ヘルプ] |
ウィキメディア・コモンズには、フォントに関連するカテゴリがあります。 |
|
この項目は、コンピュータに関連した書きかけの項目です。この項目を加筆・訂正などしてくださる協力者を求めています(PJ:コンピュータ/P:コンピュータ)。 |
この項目は、文字や文字学に関連した書きかけの項目です。この項目を加筆・訂正などしてくださる協力者を求めています(P:文字)。 |
In metal typesetting, a font is a particular size, weight and style of a typeface. Each font was a matched set of type, one piece (called a "sort") for each glyph, and a typeface comprised a range of fonts that shared an overall design.
In modern usage, with the advent of digital typography, "font" is frequently synonymous with "typeface", although the two terms do not necessarily mean the same thing. In particular, the use of "vector" or "outline" fonts means that different sizes of a typeface can be dynamically generated from one design. Each style may still be in a separate "font file"—for instance, the typeface "Bulmer" may include the fonts "Bulmer roman", "Bulmer italic", "Bulmer bold" and "Bulmer extended"—but the term "font" might be applied either to one of these alone or to the whole typeface.
Look up font in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. |
The word font (traditionally spelled fount in British English, but in any case pronounced /fɒnt/) derives from Middle French fonte "[something that has been] melted; a casting".[1] The term refers to the process of casting metal type at a type foundry.
In a manual printing (letterpress) house the word "font" would refer to a complete set of metal type that would be used to typeset an entire page. Unlike a digital typeface it would not include a single definition of each character, but commonly used characters (such as vowels and periods) would have more physical type-pieces included. A font when bought new would often be sold as (for example in a Roman alphabet) 12pt 14A 34a, meaning that it would be a size 12-point font containing 14 uppercase "A"s, and 34 lowercase "A"s. Given the name upper and lowercase because of which case the metal type was located in, otherwise known as majuscule and minuscule. The rest of the characters would be provided in quantities appropriate for the distribution of letters in that language. Some metal type characters required in typesetting, such as dashes, spaces and line-height spacers, were not part of a specific font, but were generic pieces which could be used with any font.[2] Line spacing is still often called "leading", because the strips used for line spacing were made of lead (rather than the harder alloy used for other pieces). The reason for this spacing strip being made from "lead" was because lead was a softer metal than the traditional forged metal type pieces (which was part lead, antimony and tin) and would compress more easily when "locked-up" in the printing "chase" (i.e. a carrier for holding all the type together).
In the 1880s–90s, "hot lead" typesetting was invented, in which type was cast as it was set, either piece by piece (as in the Monotype technology) or in entire lines of type at one time (as in the Linotype technology).
In addition to the character height, when using the mechanical sense of the term, there are several characteristics which may distinguish fonts, though they would also depend on the script(s) that the typeface supports. In European alphabetic scripts, i.e. Latin, Cyrillic and Greek, the main such properties are the stroke width, called weight, the style or angle and the character width.
The regular or standard font is sometimes labeled roman, both to distinguish it from bold or thin and from italic or oblique. The keyword for the default, regular case is often omitted for variants and never repeated, otherwise it would be Bulmer regular italic, Bulmer bold regular and even Bulmer regular regular. Roman can also refer to the language coverage of a font, acting as a shorthand for "Western European".
Different fonts of the same typeface may be used in the same work for various degrees of readability and emphasis, or in a specific design to make it be of more visual interest.
The weight of a particular font is the thickness of the character outlines relative to their height.
A typeface may come in fonts of many weights, from ultra-light to extra-bold or black; four to six weights are not unusual, and a few typefaces have as many as a dozen. Many typefaces for office, web and non-professional use come with just a normal and a bold weight which are linked together. If no bold weight is provided, many renderers (browsers, word processors, graphic and DTP programs) support faking a bolder font by rendering the outline a second time at an offset, or just smearing it slightly at a diagonal angle.
The base weight differs among typefaces; that means one normal font may appear bolder than some other normal font. For example, fonts intended to be used in posters are often quite bold by default while fonts for long runs of text are rather light. Therefore, weight designations in font names may differ in regard to the actual absolute stroke weight or density of glyphs in the font.
Attempts to systematize a range of weights led to a numerical classification first used by Adrian Frutiger with the Univers typeface: 35 Extra Light, 45 Light, 55 Medium or Regular, 65 Bold, 75 Extra Bold, 85 Extra Bold, 95 Ultra Bold or Black. Deviants of these were the "6 series" (italics), e.g. 46 Light Italics etc., the "7 series" (condensed versions), e.g. 57 Medium Condensed etc., and the "8 series" (condensed italics), e.g. 68 Bold Condensed Italics. From this brief numerical system it is easier to determine exactly what a font's characteristics are, for instance "Helvetica 67" (HE67) translates to "Helvetica Bold Condensed".
The TrueType font format introduced a scale from 100 through 900, which is also used in CSS and OpenType, where 400 is regular (roman or plain). The first algorithmic description of fonts was perhaps made by Donald Knuth in his Metafont and TeX system of programs.
There are many names used to describe the weight of a font in its name, differing among type foundries and designers, but their relative order is usually fixed, something like this:
The terms normal, regular and plain, sometimes also book, are being used for the standard weight font of a typeface. Where both appear and differ, book is often lighter than regular, but in some typefaces it is bolder.
Before the arrival of computers, each weight had to be drawn manually. As a result, many older multi-weight families such as Gill Sans and Monotype Grotesque have considerable differences in styles from light to extra-bold. Since the 1980s, it has become increasingly common to use automation to construct a range of weights as points along a trend, so-called multiple master font design. This means that many modern digital fonts such as Myriad and TheSans are offered in a large range of weights which offer a smooth and continuous transition from one weight to the next, although some digital fonts are created with extensive manual corrections.[3]
As digital font design allows more variants to be created faster, an increasingly common development in professional font design is the use of so-called grades: slightly different weights intended for different types of paper and ink, or printing in a different region with different ambient temperature and humidity.[4][5] For example, a thin design printed on book paper and a thicker design printed on high-gloss magazine paper may come out looking identical, since in the former case the ink will soak and spread out more. Grades are typically offered with characters having the same width on all grades, so that a change of printing materials does not affect copyfit.[6] Grades are especially common on serif fonts with their finer details.
In European typefaces, especially Roman ones, a slanted style is used to emphasise important words. This is called italic type or oblique type. These designs normally slant to the right in left-to-right scripts. Oblique styles are often called italic, but differ from 'true italic' styles.
Italic styles are more flowing than the normal typeface, approaching a more handwritten, cursive style, possibly using ligatures more commonly or gaining swashes. Although rarely encountered, a typographic face may be accompanied by a matching calligraphic face (cursive, script), giving an exaggeratedly italic style.
In many sans-serif and some serif typefaces, especially in those with strokes of even thickness the characters of the italic fonts are only slanted, which is often done algorithmically, without otherwise changing their appearance. Such oblique fonts are not true italics, because lower-case letter-shapes do not change, but are often marketed as such. Fonts normally do not include both oblique and italic styles: the designer chooses to supply one or the other.
Since italic styles clearly look different to regular (roman) styles, it is possible to have "upright italic" designs that take a more cursive form but remain upright; Computer Modern is an example of a font that offers this style. In Latin-script countries, upright italics are rare but are sometimes used in mathematics or in complex documents where a section of text already in italics needs a "double italic" style to add emphasis to it. For example, the Cyrillic minuscule "т" may look like a smaller form of its majuscule "Т" or more like a roman small "m" as in its standard italic appearance; in this case the distinction between styles is also a matter of local preference.
In Frutiger’s nomenclature the second digit for upright fonts is a 5, for italic fonts a 6 and for condensed italic fonts an 8.
The two Japanese syllabaries, katakana and hiragana, are sometimes seen as two styles or typographic variants of each other, but usually are considered separate character sets as a few of the characters have separate kanji origins. The gothic style of the roman script with broken letter forms, on the other hand, is usually considered a mere typographic variant.
Cursive-only scripts such as Arabic also have different styles, in this case for example Naskh and Kufic, although these often depend on application, area or era.
There are other aspects that can differ among font styles, but more often these are considered immanent features of the typeface. These include the look of digits (text figures) and the minuscules, which may be smaller versions of the capital letters (small caps) although the script has developed characteristic shapes for them. Some typefaces do not include separate glyphs for the cases at all, thereby abolishing the bicamerality. While most of these use uppercase characters only, some labeled unicase exist which choose either the majuscule or the minuscule glyph at a common height for both characters.
Some typefaces include fonts that vary the width of the characters (stretch), although this feature is usually rarer than weight or stroke.
Narrower fonts are usually labeled compressed, condensed or narrow. In Frutiger's system, the second digit of condensed fonts is a 7. Wider fonts may be called wide, extended or expanded. Both can be further classified by prepending extra, ultra or the like.
These separate fonts have to be distinguished from techniques that alter the letter-spacing to achieve narrower or smaller words, especially for justified text alignment.
Most typefaces either have proportional or monospaced (i.e. typewriter-style) letter widths, if the script provides the possibility. There are, however, superfamilies covering both styles.
Some fonts provide both proportional and fixed-width (tabular) digits, where the former usually coincide with lowercase text figures and the latter with uppercase lining figures.
The width of a font will depend on its intended use. Times New Roman was designed with the goal of having small width, to fit more text into a newspaper. On the other hand, Palatino has large width to increase readability.
Some professional digital typefaces include fonts that are optimised for certain sizes, for instance by using a thinner stroke weight if they are intended to be printed larger, or by using ink traps if they are to be printed at small size on poor-quality paper.[7] This was a natural feature in the metal type period for most typefaces, since each size would be cut separately and made to its own slightly different design.[8][9] However, it declined in use as the pantograph, phototypesetting and digital fonts made printing the same font at any size simpler; a revival has taken place in recent years as the range of competition in the font market has increased.[10][11][12][13] Optical sizes are particularly common for serif fonts, since their finer detail will particularly need to be bulked up for smaller sizes and made less overpowering at larger ones.[8]
There are several naming schemes for such variant designs.[14] One such scheme, invented and popularized by Adobe Systems, refers to the variant fonts by the applications those are typically used for, with the exact point sizes intended varying slightly by typeface:
Font metrics refers to metadata consisting of numeric values relating to size and space in the font overall, or in its individual glyphs. Font-wide metrics include cap height, x-height, ascender height, descender depth, and the font bounding box. Glyph-level metrics include the glyph bounding box, the advance width (the proper distance between the glyph's initial pen position and the next glyph's initial pen position), and sidebearings (space that pads the glyph outline on either side).
Some fonts, especially those intended for professional use, are duplexed: made with multiple weights having the same character width so that (for example) changing from regular to bold or italic does not affect word wrap.[15] Sabon as originally designed was a notable example of this.
Early fonts used in digital printing were often very expensive, and featured extremely tight licensing restrictions. To evade this, many computer companies have commissioned so-called 'metrically-compatible' fonts which have the same character widths as another more popular font, so the two fonts can be used to display the same document without it seeming clearly different. Arial and Century Gothic are notable examples of this, being almost exactly identical to Helvetica and ITC Avant Garde respectively.[16][17][18][19][20] Some of these were created in order to be freely redistributable, for example Google's open-source Croscore fonts duplicating common fonts used in Microsoft Office, and Red Hat's Liberation fonts.[21] It is not a requirement that the design be exactly the same (indeed, given the risk of lawsuits, this is advantageous) - for example, Steve Matteson in designing Liberation Serif (based on Times New Roman) strengthened many details and made curves less rounded and more square for better onscreen display, while Arial (based on Helvetica) opened up some of Helvetica's 'folded-up' letterforms to increase legibility.
Although most typefaces are characterised by their use of serifs, there are superfamilies that incorporate serif (antiqua) and sans-serif (grotesque) or even intermediate slab serif (Egyptian) or semi-serif fonts with the same base outlines.
A more common font variant, especially of serif typefaces, is that of alternate capitals. They can have swashes to go with italic minuscules or they can be of a flourish design for use as initials (drop caps).
Typefaces may be made in variants for different uses. These may be issued as separate font files, or the different characters may be included in the same font file if the font is a modern format such as OpenType and the application used can support this.[22][23]
Alternative characters are often called stylistic alternates. These may be switched on to allow users more flexibility to customise the font to suit their needs. The practice is not new: in the 1930s, Gill Sans, a British design, was sold abroad with alternative characters to make it resemble fonts such as Futura popular in other countries, while Bembo from the same period has two styles of 'R': one with a stretched-out leg for widely-spaced all caps text, one that blends better into body text.[24] With modern digital fonts, it is possible to group related alternative characters into stylistic sets, which may be turned on and off together. For example, in Williams Caslon Text, a revival of the 18th century font Caslon, the default italic forms have many swashes matching the original design. For a more spare appearance, these can all be turned off at once by engaging stylistic set 4.[25] Junicode, intended for academic publishing, uses ss15 to enable a variant form of 'e' used in medieval Latin. A corporation commissioning a modified version of a commercial font for their own use, meanwhile, might request that their preferred alternates be set to default.
It is traditional for fonts intended for use in books and school textbooks for young children to have simplified, single-story forms of the letters a and g; these may be called infant or schoolbook alternates. They are traditionally believed to be easier for children to read and less confusing as they resemble the forms used in handwriting.
Fonts can have different kinds of numbers, including, as described above, proportional (variable width) and tabular (fixed width) as well as lining (upper-case height) and text (lower-case height) figures. They may also include separate styles for superscript and subscript digits. Professional fonts may include even more complex settings for typesetting numbers, such as numbers intended to match the height of small caps.[26][27] In addition, some fonts such as Adobe’s Acumin and Christian Schwartz’s Neue Haas Grotesk digitisation offer two heights of lining (upper-case height) figures: one slightly lower than cap height, intended to blend better into continuous text, and one at exactly the cap height to look better in combination with capitals for uses such as UK postcodes.[28][29][30][31] With the OpenType format, it is possible to bundle all these into a single digital font file, but earlier font releases may have only one type per file.
A typical font may contain hundreds or even thousands of glyphs, often representing characters from many different languages. Oftentimes, users may only need a small subset of the glyphs that are available to them. Subsetting is the process of removing unnecessary glyphs from a font file, usually with the goal of reducing file size. This is particularly important for web fonts, since reducing file size often means reducing page load time and server load. Alternatively, fonts may be issued in different files for different regions of the world, though with the spread of the OpenType format this is now increasingly uncommon.
|
.