字体设计和排版术语“Typeface”和“Font”的区别

今天在阅读Cocoa的开发文档《Cocoa Text Architecture Guide》时，读到一段：

Typographical Concepts Are Essential for Understanding the Text System

The Cocoa text system encodes characters as Unicode values. It
translates characters into glyphs, including ligatures and other
contextual forms, and handles typefaces, styles, fonts, and families.
The system does text layout, placing glyphs horizontally or vertically
in either direction, using font metric information, and uses kerning
when appropriate. It performs high-quality line breaking and
hyphenation to create lines of text with proper alignment or
justification

很疑惑Typeface和Font的区别，于是查了一下，在知乎上看到了一个很不错的答案，分享一下，有助于区分Typeface和Font之间的微妙区别。

这两个词的用法如此混乱的主要原因是：印刷技术进步了，一些老的说法不再适用。 这是历史原因，所以一定要区分不同时期的用法区别。
另外，这两个词最初一般是在西文印刷中使用的。

字典中对它们的传统意义解释得很清楚：“typeface”指“a particular design of
type”，而“font”是“a set of type of one particular face and size”。
换句话说，传统上，typeface 是一个抽象的总体概念（它是一款“设计”），而 font
是这个概念受到几个参数的制约而成的具象物体（它是一组具有确定大小和风格的铅字，是 typeface
的子集；“font”这个词的词源和“熔化”有关，强调的是熔融铸造铅字的结果）。

后来，随着印刷技术的发展，字体的尺寸不再受到铅字的限制，很大程度上可以自由缩放。这时，很自然，“font”的意义就模糊了。
而且，印刷这一行为，从铅字与纸张的亲密接触，变成了字体设计通过种种方式间接印制在纸面上。“Font”的原有意义就更不合时宜了。
于是它的意义转向某一字体设计的具体一个式样（比如 Helvetica 是一款 typeface，而 Helvetica Regular
就是一个 font），或者字体文件（这同样是“typeface”这个抽象概念的具象子集），而 typeface 的意义基本不变。
但因为“font”这个词在电脑中如此常见，它的意义就很自然地变得更加广义了。有人会用它来称呼一款字体的设计，而且大多数人（包括很多设计师）在平常都习惯于把“typeface”和“font”用作同义词。

在翻译时，我们会区分原文在使用二者的广义、现代意义，还是狭义、传统意义。
如果是可以互换的、现代的、数字艺术中的意义，就都翻译成“字体”；如果原文在强调二者的区别，“typeface”仍然译作“字体”，而“font”可以考虑译作“字型”。

下面是我在Cocoa文档中找到的解释,主要是以Cocoa的文本系统中提供的功能的角度来解释两者的区别：

A typeface is a set of visually related shapes for some or all of the characters in a written language. For example, Times is a
typeface, designed by Stanley Morrison in 1931 for The Times
newspaper of London. All of the letter forms in Times are related in
appearance, having consistent proportions between stems (vertical
strokes) and counters (rounded shapes in letter bodies) and other
elements. When laid out in blocks of text, the shapes in a typeface
work together to enhance readability.

A typestyle, or simply style, is a distinguishing visual characteristic of a typeface. For example, roman typestyle is
characterized by upright letters having serifs and stems thicker than
horizontal lines. In italic typestyle, the letters slant to the right
and are rounded, similar to cursive or handwritten letter shapes. A
typeface usually has several associated typestyles.

A font is a series of glyphs depicting the characters in a consistent size, typeface, and typestyle. A font is intended for use
in a specific display environment. Fonts contain glyphs for all the
contextual forms, such as ligatures, as well as the normal character
forms.

A font family is a group of fonts that share a typeface but differ in typestyle. So, for example, Times is the name of a font family (as
well as the name of its typeface). Times Roman and Times Italic are
the names of two individual fonts belonging to the Times family.
Figure 2-3 shows several of the fonts in the Times font family.

Styles, also called traits, that are available in Cocoa include
variations such as bold, italic, condensed, expanded, narrow, small
caps, poster fonts, and fixed pitch. Font descriptors in the Cocoa
text system provide a font-matching capability, so that you can
partially describe a font by creating a font descriptor with, for
example, just a family name or weight, and you can then find all the
fonts on the system that match the given trait.