Typographer’s Glossary

Typeface: FF Clifford

Here’s a glossary of common type terminology, which along with the FAQs may answer many font related questions. If the information you need isn’t here, call us.

Halbfett

The common German name for the bold weight in a type family; the black weight is called "fett".

Hanging figures

See Oldstyle figures

Hinting

Guidelines added to a font to help it print and display more consistently at small sizes. Most fonts contain some form of hinting, ranging from very cursory to very thorough.

See Delta hinting.

Hybrid figures

An intermediary style between oldstyle figures and lining figures, hybrid figures are somewhat smaller than the capital letters and have a consistent body size, yet some parts extend slightly upwards and downwards.
When the different figure sets are built-in as OpenType features, certain (older) operating systems and applications will only be able to access the default figures.