Letter is any symbol that, coherently placed in a chord structure, represents the sign of the alphabet of the writing of a language. Grouped, they form words, and these in turn phrases and sentences that allow communication in society. Therefore, it is said that it is one of the basic elements that the written media have. All are under a rigorous order in the alphabet also called “alphabetical order”. This order is made up of consonant letters and vowels (a, e, i, o, u).
What is a letter
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The letter is one of the basic and main elements that written communication has. According to the officially accepted definition of letter, it can be said that it is a symbol that was designed to accept the transcription of a sound. The group of letters in a language style creates what is called an alphabet. A letter is only the graphic representation of some sound, (an example would be the lyrics of songs) and therefore it only takes the feature of abstract entity. Although they are interpreted in writing.
It can be lowercase (usually used generically in common words) and uppercase (applied to the beginning of a paragraph, to denote proper names, among others).
These are graphic representations by means of figures and signs, characteristic of the sounds that make up a language.
All are arranged in the alphabet or alphabet, called in two groups called vowels (a, e, i, o, u) and the rest are consonants.
The concept also refers to the unique way of writing that an individual has, for example when a person has a particular way of writing, like the way of writing of a Doctor. It also refers to the different writing styles, according to the different types, lowercase, uppercase, italic or print, etc.
As a symbol that indicates a part of speech, graphemes are associated with phonetics. In the pure phonetic alphabet, a phoneme is basically denoted by a basic letter, however both in theory and in practice, graphemes usually point to more than one phoneme. Two letters that represent a phoneme are called as "digraphs". Some examples of digraphs in Spanish would be ll, ch, qu, gu.
Graphemes, like elements of the alphabet, have a certain order. This is usually called "alphabetical order", however alphabetical classification is the study dedicated to the complex work of classifying and ordering graphemes in different languages.
A fairly specific example is the lyrics of songs, since they are oral sounds transcribed into lyrics. Another example that we can mention about the versatile use of these are the so-called hobbies, such as the alphabet soup, which is a table filled with vowels and consonants arranged to find and build words.
They also have specific names related to them. These names could be distinguished by language, history, and dialect. The Z, for example, in English, is called zed, unlike in the United States, where it is known as zee.
It should be noted that they can also have a numerical value. As it is in the case of Roman numerals and the letters of other writing methods. In the Spanish language and others such as English, Arabic numerals are applied instead of the Roman ones.
Typefaces
The text is an informative factor, but at the same time aesthetic and functional. Choosing the typeface for a design carefully, you can highlight and beautify the results.
There is a great variety of types of letters in the Spanish alphabet and in other Indo-European languages where the following are usually used in a preferential way:
Capital letter
This type is represented larger in relation to a lower case, usually spelled differently. Capitalization is applied at the beginning of a sentence, even though it is only a monosyllable, or at the beginning of a paragraph, or for proper names.
Also the capitalized letter is applied after a period, however in the German spelling the exception is made, despite the fact that they have adopted the Latin and Roman calligraphy, it uses capital letters to start syntactic words of nouns.
On the other hand, in Spanish, French, Italian, English, among others, capital letters are usually applied in acronyms (for example; Sra., Sr., Mr.,) and acronyms that are similarly abbreviations (such as EU, USA or YPF, etc).
Lowercase letter
This class is usually the most common of letters, or the one used for common generic words. In different alphabets, the lower case is the spelling that, unlike the upper case, has a smaller size and a different style. It is the unmarked spelling, of general application. Lower case letters are used in the European alphabets, Latin, Greek, Armenian and Cyrillic. An example of its stroke and what makes it different from a capital letter (lowercase "a", uppercase "A").
Accented letter
The accent or graphic accent is a sign that is placed over the letter, in Spanish, for example, it goes over the vowels a, e, i, o, u as established in the spelling rules of that language. They are also marked to avoid ambiguities and facilitate their reading.
What is a typeface
In typography, a type that refers to each of the pieces used in the printing press in which there is an enhancement with a sign or letter, as well as to each of the types of this letter. In computer writing, it is also called types or fonts to groups of vector styles that symbolize each of the characters of a letter, specifying everything related to their conformation and position, saved in a file; in the photocomposition, they are individual models of each letter.
In the computer field, each of the independent symbols is usually referred to as a character or glyph. A computer file with a group of glyphs designed with a unit of form is also continuously called a type, as well as the typeface extra typography, although it is much more common to speak of fonts.
The nomenclature associated with the types is not unified, and it is not strange that certain expressions are used indefinitely, for example typography, to refer to type (in the aspect of letters of some type).
On the other hand, technically fonts are called the styles that are used in calligraphy from the writing models such as initial letter, capital letter, cursive, magisterial, Gothic, among others.
What is a series
The set of different letters is known as a series, drawn mostly by the same house or by the same designer, in which they are distinguished in certain classifiable characteristics: inclination, weight, spacing and proportion. A note resulting from this concept is the expression typeface family, in which the types can be ordered according to their main characteristics, independently of their belonging to a series.
In digital typography, depending on the template, a series can be contained in a single file, which stores the autonomous models; In older templates, each item in the series had to run in a different file, and in certain cases, even extra Elzevirian special signs, ligatures, and figures are displayed in a different file.
What are font families
A typeface family is known as a set of alphabetic and non-alphabetic signs with common structural and stylistic features, which coincide in certain popular design aspects, which allow it to be identified as a member of a group.
The alphabetic signs that make up the font family are represented by uppercase lowercase letters, checked uppercase, checked lowercase, uppercase and lowercase ligatures.
Non-alphabetic signs are punctuation marks, numbers (tubular or variable width), and commercial signs. There are some typeface families that include a third set of signs: small caps or capitals, smaller capital signs, and small capitals or marked capitals.
In a typeface family all the elements that are required to write a text of any genre or class in different languages are designed.
When the press used lead types, they were filed according to an established “box” order. This box has two shelves, the upper one which was where the capital letters were arranged and the report in which the lower case letters were found. That's where the names "upper box" and "lower box" come from for alphabet systems.
Type families are also usually known as font families. Such sources can be photographic film, metal, or electronic media.
There are within each of these families, three fundamental variants, known as:
- Normal or round (without any alteration).
- Italic, is the same slanted letter (in addition to italics or italics).
- And the bold type, with the highlighted outline.
