The type was stored in shallow wooden drawers, called job cases, that were divided into small compartments for each letter, numeral, ligature, punctuation mark, and varying widths of spacing. In the United States, the most popular style of type case was the California Job Case, where the layout of glyphs was organized so that a typesetter would be able to quickly find the correct glyph from memory, just like typing on a keyboard but slower.
Older styles of type cases organized the capital letters in a separate case from the minuscules. When typing a letter in Microsoft Word, it makes sense to use the term font, since you're composing your document one font at a time even if you use multiple fonts in that letter. With desktop publishing, the general public became introduced to the term font, rather than typeface, and it became more or less synonymous with typeface. At Hoban Press, we like to keep things printerly and use the word typeface, but feel free to use whichever term you prefer, we won't hold it against you!
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One of the major traps, when talking about type, is mixing up fonts with typefaces or treating them as synonymous. Many a typographic expert has haughtily corrected a beginner for mistakenly using the word font when he or she should have said typeface. To those of us who think about fonts only when choosing one in Microsoft Word, the distinction between the terms can seem confusing, esoteric, and even arcane.
Back in the good old days of analog printing, every page was laboriously set out in frames with metal letters.
That was rolled in ink, and then it was pressed down onto a clean piece of paper. That was a page layout. If the font is the song, the typeface is the artist. The difference between a font and a typeface has its roots in the history of printing. The word font itself comes from the Middle French 'fonte', meaning cast in metal. Printers cast complete sets of metal letters to make up a font. Fonts with a common design made up a typeface.
In a box containing a specific font were two cases — one for capitals and one for small letters — which is where upper and lower case comes from. Blocks of text were assembled letter by letter to form a page layout, which was then rolled with ink and pressed onto paper to make prints.
When talking about typography, the terms Font and Typeface tend to get mixed up and used almost as if they are synonymous. This confusion shows how quick industry terminology changes with the introduction of new processes and technologies. But, at the end of the day, one has to wonder if the distinction really matters today. The main difference between these two terms is that a typeface or type family is the name of a specific collection of related fonts. In comparison, font refers to a particular weight, width, and style within that typeface.
To put it in simple terms, each variation of a typeface is a font.
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