The memoir class - The UK TeX Archive

TerminologyLike all professions and trades, typographers and printers have their specialised vocabulary.First there is the question of pages, leaves and sheets. The trimmed sheets of paper thatmake up a book are called leaves, and I will call the untrimmed sheets the stock material. Aleaf has two sides, and a page is one side of a leaf. If you think of a book being opened flat,then you can see two leaves. The front of the righthand leaf, is called the recto page of thatleaf, and the side of the lefthand leaf that you see is called the verso page of that leaf. So,a leaf has a recto and a verso page. Recto pages are the odd-numbered pages and versopages are even-numbered.Then there is the question of folios. The typographical term for the number of a pageis folio. This is not to be confused with the same term as used in ‘Shakespeare’s First Folio’where the reference is to the height and width of the book, nor to its use in the phrase‘folio signature’ where the term refers to the number of times a printed sheet is folded. Notevery page in a book has a printed folio, and there may be pages that do not have a folio atall. Pages with folios, whether printed or not, form the pagination of the book. Pages thatare not counted in the pagination have no folios.I have not been able to find what I think is a good definition for ‘type’ as it seems tobe used in different contexts with different meanings. It appears to be a kind of genericword; for instance there are type designers, type cutters, type setters, type foundries,...For my purposes I propose that type is one or more printable characters (or variations orextensions to this idea). Printers use the term sort to refer to one piece of lead type.A typeface is a set of one or more fonts, in one or more sizes, designed as a stylisticwhole.A font is a set of characters. In the days of metal type and hot lead a font meant a completealphabet and auxiliary characters in a given size. More recently it is taken to meana complete set of characters regardless of size. A font of roman type normally consistsof CAPITAL LETTERS, SMALL CAPITALS, lowercase letters, numbers, punctuation marks,ligatures (such as ‘fi’ and ‘ffi’), and a few special symbols like &.A font family is a set of fonts designed to work harmoniously together, such as a pair ofroman and italic fonts.The size of a font is expressed in points (72.27 points equals 1 inch equals 25.4 millimeters).The size is a rough indication of the height of the tallest character, but different fontswith the same size may have very different actual heights. Traditionally font sizes werereferred to by names (see Table 1) but nowadays just the number of points is used.The typographers’ and printers’ term for the vertical space between the lines of normaltext is leading, which is also usually expressed in points and is usually larger than the fontxxxvChapter last updated 2013/04/24 (revision 442)