Say precisely what you mean.

The words designers use when they know what they’re looking at. How text is set, spaced, and read. The space between two specific characters, adjusted manually. Different from tracking, which affects all characters equally. Letter-spacing applied uniformly across a word or block of text. Uppercase labels almost always need more of it. The vertical space between lines of text. Too tight and text suffocates. Too loose and it stops reading as a paragraph. Spacing adjusted by eye rather than the font’s built-in metrics. Removes awkward gaps between certain letter pairs that default metrics leave behind. A font feature that gives every digit the same width so numbers in columns stay aligned as they change. Essential for prices, stats, and any data that updates. A predetermined set of font sizes that work together, usually based on a ratio. Picking sizes from the scale keeps hierarchy consistent. How thick or thin a typeface’s strokes are. Bold is for UI emphasis and hierarchy. Italic is for linguistic stress or citation, not UI hierarchy. The height of a lowercase letter like x, relative to the cap height. A high x-height makes a font feel larger at the same point size, which is why two fonts at 16px can look very different in size. The height of a capital letter. Along with x-height, it determines how large a font feels on screen. Useful when matching fallback fonts or pairing typefaces. Two characters that merge into a single glyph to avoid awkward collisions. fi and fl are the most common. Some ligatures are decorative and belong in display use only. How the browser renders font edges. On Mac, antialiased renders thinner and lighter than the default. Designers often apply it globally for a crisper feel, though it reduces fidelity on non-retina screens. What happens when text is longer than its container. Truncation with an ellipsis is the most common solution. Use the single unicode character, not three periods, and never cut mid-word. Breaking a word across lines with a hyphen. Helps with narrow columns and justified text. Best left to the browser automatically to avoid breaking at unexpected moments. A technique for fluid type sizing that sets a minimum, preferred, and maximum value. The size scales smoothly between breakpoints without needing separate declarations at each one. A single word left alone on the last line of a paragraph. text-wrap: balance can…