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bitmap font
A bitmap font is a digital represention of a font that is already fixed in size or a limited set of sizes.
Families
A family is all the fonts that comprise a group, as in Arial
Light, Arial Light Italic, Arial, Arial Italic, Arial Bold and
Arial Bold Italic.
Some families will also include other weights, like Semi-Bold or
Book, and fonts that have been Condensed or Extended, or any
combination of these two, weight and aspect ratio.
Font
A font is a set of printable or displayable text characters in a specific style and size. The type design for a set of fonts is the typeface and variations of this design form the typeface family. Thus, Arial is a typeface family, Arial italic is a typeface, and Arial italic 10-point is a font. In practice, font and typeface are often used without much precision, sometimes interchangably.
Glyph
In information technology, a glyph (pronounced GLIHF) is a graphic symbol that provides the appearance or form for a character. A glyph can be an alphabetic or numeric font or some other symbol that pictures an encoded character. The following quote is from a document written as background for the Unicode character set standard. An ideal characterization of characters and glyphs and their relationship may be stated as follows: A character conveys distinctions in meaning or sounds. A character has no intrinsic appearance. A glyph conveys distinctions in form. A glyph has no intrinsic meaning. One or more characters may be depicted by one or more glyph representations (instances of an abstract glyph) in a possibly context dependent fashion. Glyph is from a Greek word for "carving."
Hinting
At its most basic level hinting (or, more accurately, instructing) a font is a method of defining exactly which pixels are turned on in order to create the best possible character bitmap shape at small sizes and low resolutions. Since it is a glyph's outline that determines which pixels will constitute a character bitmap at a given size, it is often necessary to modify the outline to create a good bitmap image; in effect modifying the outline until the desired combination of pixels is turned on. A hint is a mathematical instruction added to the font to distort a character's outline at particular sizes. Technically, hints result in operations which modify a contours' scaled control point co-ordinates before the outline is scan converted.
Kerning
Kerning is the reducing of the space allocated between two glyphs to make them fit more comfortably.
Outline font
An outline font is a software typeface that can generate a scalable range of font sizes. The two most popular outline font software programs on today's computers are TrueType and Adobe's Type 1.
Type 1
Type 1 is a standard outline font (ISO 9541).
TrueType
TrueType is a digital font technology designed by Apple Computer, and now used by both Apple and Microsoft in their operating systems. TrueType fonts offer the highest possible quality on computer screens and printers, and include a range of features which make them easy to use.
Unicode
The Unicode Standard.