Small Capitals - Smaller versions of capital letters, not reduced capitals, but especially designed small capitals which can often be ordered with a certain type family as a so-called Expert of SC font. Slightly bigger in x-heigh than lowercase letters. Used in texts that include many abbreviations or successive capitals. ITC New Baskerville has small caps.
Ligatures - Combinations of characters that were designed because, in metal typesetting, the overhanging ascender in the letter f would crash into an ascender or the dot of an i if it directly followed the f. The sorts couldn't overlap as they can in photography or digital typesetting. In combinations of for instance the f and the i, ligatures give better results in photographic or digital settings as well because the ascender of the f and the dot of the i are designed to join instead of arbitrarily overlapping. The & symbol was originally a ligature formed of the letters e and t. My font does have ligatures for fi and fl.
Foot mark - A straight or slanted slash mark that indicate the measurement of 12 inches.
Apostrophe - In essence a mini 6 and 9 are used to quote things or for contractions.
Inch mark - Two straight or slanted slash marks that indicate the measurement of 12 inches.
Quotation marks - Two mini 6s or 9s that surround something that someone said or taken from a piece of literature.
Hyphen - used as a symbol to break words and comes in a variety of sizes. Every editing program has a setting for automatic hyphenation although most designers will turn this setting off and insert soft returns manually. A soft return makes sure that in case of corrections or text overflow this break is cancelled. Adding a hyphen and then using a hard return is not recommended as the hyphen will remain in case of text overflow.
En Dash - is longer than a hyphen and is used to demarcate a parenthetical thought or to indicate a sudden change of direction as in, for instance: 'Unfortunately the document to be discussed - which you received via email - is no longer up to date'. Usually these dashes can be replaced by commas or the phrase can be bracketed.
- the en dash is used to indicate parenthetical thought
- as a replacement for the word to
- in the meaning from... to
- as a minus sign
- as a bullet sign
Em Dash - is used to demarcate parenthetical thought in English texts, but the dashes are unspaced (without white spaces on either side.)
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