†Fonts
A font is a specific, digital or physical set of characters—including letters, numbers, and symbols that hare a single style, weight, and size. See the list fonts I like for a few font ideas.
There are many types and sub-types but below are listed the 5 main general types of font.
Serif Fonts
Derived from early printing fonts that emulated written text with font decoration. Look finished and like printed books etc and are optimised for reading with variable spacing of letters making them more compact than monospace fonts.
Blackletter fonts are a subgroup of Serif fonts and the first type used in the west.
Sans-Serif Fonts
More modern reading fonts that dispose of the use of 'decoration' to the letters.
A subgroup of Sans serif fonts is Grotesk most from the early (19th century to early 20th) sans-serif designs.
Script Fonts
Mimic handwriting more artistic.
Monospace Fonts
Equal spacing given to all characters derived from the typewriter that had this technical limitation. This limitation is a boon for coding and for text editing. Spacing is wider than in Serif fonts making it slower to read but better for editing.
Display Fonts
Eye catching bold fonts for graphics etc. Not meant for dense text.
On The Web
In CSS, there are five generic font families Serif, Sans-serif, Monospace fonts, Cursive fonts, Fantasy fonts as per the categories above so you can always call a fallback family of fonts in your css.
p { font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, sans-serif;}