What is a font?

When it comes to writing anything on a digital device, the font might well be the thing that we notice first. The font is how the characters – the letters, numbers, and punctuation – appear on the screen.

You have almost certainly encountered different fonts before, and you probably recognise the names of some of them too, such as

Times New Roman

Times New Roman

Verdana

Comic Sans MS

Arial

Georgia

Almost every programme or app that lets you write things in any meaningful way will give you the option to change fonts from a list of fonts that it has available. For instance, we can change the font on Microsoft Word, or on our emails, or when creating websites.