ABSTRACT
Many of the terms that are used by typographers to depict the parts of a printed character have been used by FDEs to describe typewritten letters. Examples of such terms might be ascender, descender, and serif. There are other words commonly used in the typographic world, such as stress and stem, that have equivalent meanings for document examiners. Rather than using the word stress, document examiners have often referred to the transition from a thin line to a thicker line as shading, and the vertical backbone of a letter as its staff rather than its stem. When it comes to describing the parts of a typographic character, however, the vocabulary of the typographer is much richer than that of the FDE. This is probably to be expected, since printers have had about a 500-year head start.
