A Short Primer On Digital Printing and Fonts

Printing is an ancient practice that dates back to ancient times; in fact, the cylindrical seals used during the Mesopotamian era are widely considered to have been the first form of non-mechanical press systems. Typography as we know it was not formally adopted until many centuries later when the Association Typographique Internationale emerged as a professional body to promote global font standards.

The font measurement units we use these days for web design and development are digital versions of those stipulated by the Association Typographique Internationale in the mid-1960s. When you see Times New Roman set at 10 pixels, for example, that measurement is a direct equivalent of movable type.

Digital measurement units are essential for the professional work of web designers and developers; however, they also have a significant impact on the way you design and build your site.

You need to know the basics of web typography in order to design and build sites that achieve effective readability on different resolutions, devices, browsers, and operating systems.

With digital typography, readability is determined by the relationship between text size and the size of its surrounding visual elements (type size, font size, and line height). And, if you want your site to look great at any size, you need to take font quality into account, too. That's where web font performance comes in.

Web fonts work a little differently than they did with print. In print, font files (TTF or OTF) are preinstalled on an operating system. Because web fonts are loaded directly into web browsers and can change based on user-agent preferences, you need to work with web fonts differently than you might with print fonts.

It is important to understand that web fonts aren't inherently more powerful than their print-based counterparts. Print fonts are simply designed to be displayed in a particular physical setting; web fonts are designed to be rendered into a document, page, or a website. And since they're designed to be embedded directly into a web browser, you have complete access to their features at your disposal.

For example, web fonts can only be used in the ways that are explicitly allowed by browsers. By default, any web font can be displayed at the same size and font as the rest of the web page content. You can override this default behavior though percentage units. For more information click here https://www.reddit.com/r/webdesign/comments/ohdxbt/usingpercentageunitsinfontsize/.