Gadgetory

how boring would it be if all the text on your computer or tablet screen always looked the same I mean there's something cool and cyber punkish about doing everything in a console typeface but having a wide variety of typefaces is important to people like designers and developers and anyone who wants to add a little pizazz to their documents or webpages but hold up for a second why do you keep on saying typeface aren't those things called fonts all of these terms have become virtually interchangeable if you want to be super super proper a typeface is an actual style of a letter such as Cobre Arial impact etc and a font is a specific size and variation such as bold or italic but since most people in the modern era are just fine calling typefaces fonts that's what we'll be doing for the rest of this video now the idea of using different fonts for different applications has been around for centuries long before the advent of digital word processing although back in the day changing fonts meant changing metallic movable-type in a typewriter or printing press often a much more tedious process than just pointing and clicking it's a good thing too that switching fonts has become so easy since they've obviously had a ton of variation in fonts just think about how different times new roman and wingdings are or how whether to use serif or sans serif fonts has become an important design choice by the way seraphs are those little lines at the edges of letters that some people believe makes printed text easier to read different fonts has also been proven to have certain psychological effects on the people that see them so let us know in the comments down below if you'd like to see a future video on things like why Comic Sans is so hated and produces anger and people that read it and why hipsters have such an affinity for Helvetica but trying to work with so many different fonts wasn't always easy like on earlier pcs unlike old-fashioned typewriters where you knew exactly what you were getting as soon as the letter was printed on the paper older computers used bitmap fonts that essentially store the letters as small bitmapped images although this strategy did save on processing power.this also made fonts suffer from aliasing or jaggies when you increased their size if you use an older Macintosh you might remember how this was particularly prevalent in the old Chicago fonts that Apple used heavily what as processing power grew the industry started shifting towards vector fonts in formats such as TrueType and OpenType which allowed accurate scaling not just on monitors but on printers as well as users started to shift away from old-school dot matrix printers towards laser printers demand grew for being able to see exactly what you would get both on screen and on paper which makes sense you see vector fonts are defined not as an arrangement of pixels but as how the lines and curves in each letter relate to one another this means that they can be scaled to any size without losing quality most modern fonts are vector fonts which you can see yourself by opening a modern web page on a modern browser and zooming way in you should see smooth lines and curves instead of jaggies pretty cool try it out for yourself later as LCD monitors became more popular we also saw the rise of technologies like Microsoft's ClearType which is essentially anti-aliasing for fonts even though vector fonts can be scaled nicely as I just said it can look a bit rough on normal-sized LCDs because modern flat panels have pixels fixed at very specific locations on the screen meaning that jaggies can appear when characters have to try to fit themselves into these pixels on a grid especially on lower resolution displays this can be a problem clear type and other anti-aliasing tech alleviates the problem by placing lighter colored pixels around your letters and you don't even need a Titan X or R 9 Theory to run it pretty cool of course font technology hasn't been the only thing changing over the years since our tastes have evolved as well but no matter what your style is you're likely to find something to suit your preferences as there are now thousands of freely available to download fonts I just recommend steering clear of the after mentioned Comic Sans unless you haven't I'm tired of Doge jokes yet I haven't so I mean I'm down sent over to me at Twitter Luke go to squirrel AFR Doge jokes everywhere do it with a lynda.com membership you can watch and learn from top experts who are passionate about teaching you can stream thousands of video courses on demand and learn on your own schedule at your own pace and you can browse each course transcript to follow along or search for an answer or skip to a point of a video that you may have missed before and you can take notes as you go along and refer to them later on you can download these tutorials and watch them on the go if you need to bus on transit or whatever and it includes access on your iOS or 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just vegetate and watch people be complete idiots on the Internet you can go over to channel superfund and we will do just that no problem