A ligature is a special character that is used to represent a sequence of characters. This is best explained by example -- when the letter "fi" are rendered, the dot on the "i" collides with the "f", and the serif on the top left of the "i" can also collide with the horizontal stroke of the "f". The "fi" ligature is a single character that can be used in the place of a single "f" followed by a single "i". There are also ligatures for "fl", "ffi", and "ffl". Most fonts only include the "fi" and "fl" ligatures. The other ligatures may be made available in an expert font .

A graphics language used for creating fonts. Metafont has a lot of nice features, the main one being that fonts created with metafont need not just scale linearly. That is, a 17 point computer modern font generated by metafont is not the same as a magnified 10 point computer modern font. Prior to Adobe's multiple master technology, metafont was unique with respect to having this feature. Metafonts main advantage is that it produces high quality fonts. The disadvantage is that generating bitmaps from the outline fonts is slow, so they aren't feasible for WYSIWYG publishing.

a programming language designed for page description. PostScript was a trademark of it's inventor, Adobe. However, it is also an ISO standard. Postscript needs an interpreter to render it. This can be done via a program on the computer, such as ghostscript, or it can be interpreted by some printers.

Fonts without serif (sans is French for ''without''). These fonts have a stark appearance, and are well suited for writing headlines. While textbook typography mandates that serif fonts be used just for headlines, they can have other uses. There are sans serif fonts designed for readability as opposed to impact. Short punchy documents that are skimmed (such as catalogues and marketting brochures) may use them, and recently, Microsoft have made available the Verdana font which is designed for readability at small sizes on low resolution devices. Well known sans serif fonts include Lucida Sans, MS Comic Sans, Avant Garde, Arial, Verdana, Century Gothic.

Fonts with little hooks (called serifs) on the ends of the font. The serifs usually help make the font more readable. However, serifs are quite difficult to render on low resolution devices, especially at small font sizes (because they are a fine detail), so it is often true that at small sizes on low resolution devices, sans serif fonts (such as Microsoft's Verdana ) prove more readable. Another issue is that there are sans serif fonts (like the moderns) that are not designed for writing long documents.

A certain class of font whose serifs look like slabs (eg: flat lines or blocks) and not hooks. Slab serif fonts are often , but not always very readable. Because the serifs are simple and strong, they give one the feeling that they have been punched into the page. Well known examples of slab serifs are Clarendon, New Century Schoolbook, and Memphis.

A type of font designed by Adobe. These fonts are well supported by almost all linux applications, because they have been supported by the X server architecture and the PostScript standard for a long time. Postscript fonts are distributed in many different formats. Typically, a UNIX PostScript font is distributed as an afm (adobe font metric) file, and an outline file, which is usually a .pfb (printer font binary) or .pfa (printer font ascii) file. The outline file contains all the glyphs, while the metric file contains the metrics.

Similar to Type 1. The file extensions are similar to Type 1 fonts (they are distributed as .pfa and afm files), but they are