Fount

Fount (pronounced phont)

(1) A spring of water; fountain (now mostly poetic use).

(2) A receptacle in church for holy water.

(3) A receptacle for oil in a lamp.

(4) In metal typesetting, a set of type sorts in one size.

(5) In phototypesetting, a set of patterns forming glyphs of any size, or the film on which they are stored; in digital typesetting, a set of glyphs in a single style, representing one or more alphabets or writing systems, or the computer code representing it.

(6) In computing, a file containing the code used to draw and compose the glyphs of one or more typographic fonts on a computer display or printer (now always with the spelling font).

(7) A source or origin; often used in a mystical sense such as a “fount of wisdom”.

1250-1300: A back formation (as a shortened form) from fountain, from the Old English font, a borrowing from the From Middle French fonte, feminine past participle of verb fondre (to melt), from the Latin fons (fountain)  It came from a primitive Indo-European root cognate with the Sanskrit धन्वति (dhanvati) (flows, runs), possibly dhenhz- (to flow).  The Old French fonte (a founding, casting), came apparently from the (unattested) Vulgar Latin funditus (a casting), from the Latin fundere (to melt). Fount is a noun; the noun plural is founts.

Fount:  Baptism Fount, Christ Church Cathedral, Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada.

The two meanings are unrelated.  The sense of font (and fount) as a "complete set of characters of a particular face and size of printing type" dates from the 1680s and such things have been referred to from the 1570s as a "casting" (now more commonly as "typeface".  The meaning in mechanical printing became attached because of the link with the Middle French fonte (a casting), noun use of feminine past participle of fondre (to melt) from the fundere (past participle fusus) (to melt; cast; pour out) from a nasalized form of the primitive Indo-European root gheu- (to pour).  The fount became so-called because all the letters in a given set were cast at the same time; fonte is also the root of foundry (the places where metal for the typefaces was melted) and, because of the melting cheese: fondue.  In modern use, the preferred convention is for font to be used when referring to digital typefaces and fount for metal and other older systems of typesetting.  Fount should be used for all other senses although many US dictionaries do suggest font may be used for all purposes.

Font: One font even has a biography.

While the long-running operating system (OS) wars and the bus wars of the 1980s & 1990s were landmark events in the digital revolution and followed with great interest by nerds, they were barely noticed by most consumers.  By contrast, the font wars of the early 1990s were little more than brief skirmishes but their implications proved immeasurably greater for most users.  In the 1980s, for all but a handful of computer users, the font used was almost always whatever was an application’s default and most wouldn’t have known its name, features like “italics” or “bold” sometimes possible but usually key-stroke intensive selectively to apply.  The sub-set using graphical interfaces such as Apple’s Macintosh (1984; it didn’t become the “Mac” until 1999) and the fondly-remembered Amiga Workbench (1985) enjoyed a wider range and more control but even then what a font looked like on a screen and how it appeared when printed didn’t always align and for those who needed professional-standard output, high-quality fonts were expensive.  For most, even if there were fonts available, there were many limitations including frequent limitations on the number which could be included in a single document.

The industry standard then was Adobe’s PostScript but that nice, profitable niche was upended when Apple and Microsoft cross-licensed their technologies, the breakthrough being the bundling of a number of TrueType fonts (emulating some publishing stalwarts) with Windows 3.1, released to general availability in March 1992.  Not best pleased, Adobe’s CEO called a press conference at which tearfully he announced Adobe’s Type 1 format was now in the public domain; now not best pleased were those many customers who’d recently paid Adobe’s high prices.  Adobe also circulated a document explaining why PostScript was better than TrueType, something with which analysts agreed but the almost all also agreed it was the latter to which consumers would flock.  They were right and within weeks the bulletin boards were offering dozens of TrueType character sets, some derivative, some fanciful and many exactly what the market wanted.  There are now thousands of TrueType fonts.

During her campaign (which she actually won!) for the Democratic nomination for the 2016 presidential election, crooked Hillary Clinton's Burn Book probably would have been referred to internally as her "Bern Book" because it would have been so filled with tactics designed to sabotage the campaign of Bernie Sanders (b 1941; US senator (Independent, Vermont) since 2007) (digitally altered image).  In Mean Girls (2004), the Burn Book's cover used the "ransom note" technique which involved physically cutting letters from newspapers & magazines and pasting them onto a page, a trick of the pre-DNA analysis age which left no identifiable handwriting.  There are a number of "ransom" fonts which emulate the appearance in software.