Computer font
digital description of a typographical font
A computer font or digital font is a digital data file containing a set of graphically related glyphs, usually designed and created using a font editor. Such a font specifically designed for the computer screen, and not for printing, is termed a screen font.
In the terminology of movable metal type, a typeface is a set of characters that share common design features across styles and sizes (for example, all the varieties of Gill Sans), while a font is a set of pieces of movable type in a specific typeface, size, width, weight, slope, etc. (for example, Gill Sans bold 12 point). In HTML, CSS, and related technologies, the font family attribute refers to the digital equivalent of a typeface. Since the 1990s, many people outside the printing industry have used the word font as a synonym for typeface.
There are three basic kinds of computer font file data formats:
Bitmap fonts consist of a matrix of dots or pixels representing the image of each glyph in each face and size. This technology is largely obsolete.
Vector fonts (including, and sometimes used as a synonym for, outline fonts) use Bézier curves, drawing instructions and mathematical formulae to describe each glyph, which make the character outlines scalable to any size.
Stroke fonts use a series of specified lines and additional information to define the size and shape of the line in a specific typeface, which together determines the appearance of the glyph.
The public source identifies “Computer font” as digital description of a typographical font. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Computer, font and digital.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1147633. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Computer font” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.