Typography terms you keep nodding along to

The words that come up in every design critique that nobody explains twice. Writing them down once so I stop pretending.

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Kerning

space between two specific letters, adjusted by eye. bad kerning is the loose "AV" or "To" that looks off no matter the font

tracking

space applied evenly across a whole run of text, not letter pairs. headlines usually want it tightened, all caps usually wants it opened up

Leading

line spacing, named for the strips of lead typesetters used to add it by hand. start around 120-145% of the type size and adjust by eye

x-height

ligature

two letters fused into one glyph so they stop colliding. fi and fl are the classic pair, still true in most serif text faces

Widow

a single word left alone on the last line of a paragraph. avoidable, still happens to me weekly

orphan

a widow's cousin, but stranded at the top of a column or page instead of the bottom

Hanging indent

optical alignment

aligning by how it looks, not by the numbers. round letters like O sit slightly past the margin so they read as even

Ascender / descender

the part of a letter that reaches above the x-height (b, d, l) or below the baseline (g, p, y). tall ascenders read airier

small caps

Baseline

invisible line every letter sits on. drop caps and superscripts get measured against this, not the cap height

tabular figures

numbers sharing one width so they stack in a column. regular figures don't, a table set with those reads drunk. pin this above the desk

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