Serif in the context of Minion Pro

Trajan is a serif typeface designed in 1989 by Carol Twombly for Adobe.

The design is based on the letterforms of capitalis monumentalis or Roman square capitals, as used for the inscription at the base of Trajan's Column, hence the name. Trajan is an all-capitals typeface, as the Romans did not use lowercase letters on monumental inscriptions. Twombly created the design taking inspiration from a full-size picture of a rubbing of the inscription. It is well known for appearing on many film posters.

Roman square capitals, also called capitalis monumentalis, inscriptional capitals, elegant capitals and capitalis quadrata, are an ancient Roman form of writing, and the basis for modern capital letters. Square capitals are characterized by sharp, straight lines, supple curves, thick and thin strokes, angled stressing and incised serifs. When written in documents this style is known as Latin book hand.

Capitalization (American English) or capitalisation (Commonwealth English) is writing a word with its first letter as a capital letter (uppercase letter) and the remaining letters in lower case, in writing systems with a case distinction. The term also may refer to the use of uppercase letters in general, or the choice between uppercase and lowercase.

Conventional writing systems (orthographies) for different languages have different conventions for capitalization, for example, the capitalization of titles. Conventions also vary, to a lesser extent, between different style guides. In addition to the Latin script, capitalization also affects the Armenian, Cyrillic, Georgian and Greek alphabets.

A bayonet mount (mainly as a method of mechanical attachment, such as fitting a lens to a camera using a matching lens mount) or bayonet connector (for electrical use) is a fastening mechanism consisting of a cylindrical male side with one or more radial pegs, and a female receptor with matching L-shaped slot(s) and with spring(s) to keep the two parts locked together. The slots are shaped like a capital letter L with serif (a short upward segment at the end of the horizontal arm); the peg slides into the vertical arm of the L, rotates across the horizontal arm, then is pushed slightly upwards into the short vertical "serif" by the spring; the connector is no longer free to rotate unless pushed down against the spring until the peg is out of the "serif".

The bayonet mount is the standard light bulb fitting in the United Kingdom and in many countries that were members of the British Empire including Australia, Hong Kong, Fiji, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Ireland and New Zealand, parts of the Middle East and Africa and, historically, in France and Greece.

Garamond is a group of many serif typefaces, named for sixteenth-century Parisian engraver Claude Garamond, generally spelled as Garamont in his lifetime. Garamond-style typefaces are popular to this day and often used for book printing and body text.

Garamond's types followed the model of an influential typeface cut for Venetian printer Aldus Manutius by his punchcutter Francesco Griffo in 1495, and are in what is now called the old-style of serif letter design, letters with a relatively organic structure resembling handwriting with a pen, but with a slightly more structured, upright design.

A swash is a typographical flourish, such as an exaggerated serif, terminal, tail, entry stroke, etc., on a glyph.The use of swash characters dates back to at least the 16th century, as they can be seen in Ludovico Vicentino degli Arrighi's La Operina, which is dated 1522. As with italic type in general, they were inspired by the conventions of period handwriting. Arrighi's designs influenced designers in Italy and particularly in France.

In typography and lettering, a sans-serif, sans serif (/ˈsæn(z) ˈsɛrɪf/), gothic, or simply sans letterform is one that does not have extending features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. Sans-serif typefaces tend to have less stroke width variation than serif typefaces. They are often used to convey simplicity and modernity or minimalism. For the purposes of type classification, sans-serif designs are usually divided into these major groups: § Grotesque, § Neo-grotesque, § Geometric, § Humanist, and § Other or mixed.

Sans-serif typefaces have become the most prevalent for display of text on computer screens. On lower-resolution digital displays, fine details like serifs may disappear or appear too large. The term comes from the French word sans, meaning "without" and "serif" of uncertain origin, possibly from the Dutch word schreef meaning "line" or pen-stroke. In printed media, they are more commonly used for display use and less for body text.

Times New Roman is a serif typeface commissioned for use by the British newspaper The Times in 1931. It has become one of the most popular typefaces of all time and is installed on most personal computers. The typeface was conceived by Stanley Morison, the artistic adviser to the British branch of the printing equipment company Monotype, in collaboration with Victor Lardent, a lettering artist in The Times's advertising department.

Asked to advise on a redesign, Morison recommended that The Times change their body text typeface from a spindly nineteenth-century face to a more robust, solid design, returning to traditions of printing from the eighteenth century and before. This matched a common trend in printing tastes of the period. Morison proposed an older Monotype typeface named Plantin as a basis for the design, and Times New Roman mostly matches Plantin's dimensions. The main change was that the contrast between strokes was enhanced to give a crisper image. The new design made its debut in The Times on 3 October 1932. After one year, the design was released for commercial sale. In Times New Roman's name, Roman is a reference to the regular or roman style (sometimes also called Antiqua), the first part of the Times New Roman typeface family to be designed. Roman type has roots in Italian printing of the late 15th and early 16th centuries, but Times New Roman's design has no connection to Rome or to the Romans.

Bembo is a serif typeface created by the British branch of the Monotype Corporation in 1928–1929 and most commonly used for body text. It is a member of the "old-style" of serif fonts, with its regular or roman style based on a design cut around 1495 by Francesco Griffo for Venetian printer Aldus Manutius, sometimes generically called the "Aldine roman". Bembo is named after Manutius's first publication with it, a small 1496 book by the poet and cleric Pietro Bembo. The italic is based on work by Giovanni Antonio Tagliente, a calligrapher who worked as a printer in the 1520s, after the time of Manutius and Griffo.

Monotype created Bembo during a period of renewed interest in the printing of the Italian Renaissance, under the influence of Monotype executive and printing historian Stanley Morison. It followed a previous more faithful revival of Manutius's work, Poliphilus, whose reputation it largely eclipsed. Monotype also created a second, much more eccentric italic for it to the design of calligrapher Alfred Fairbank, which also did not receive the same attention as the normal version of Bembo.

Antiqua (/ænˈtiːkwə/) is a style of typeface used to mimic styles of handwriting or calligraphy common during the 15th and 16th centuries. Letters are designed to flow, and strokes connect together in a continuous fashion; in this way it is often contrasted with Fraktur-style typefaces where the individual strokes are broken apart. The two typefaces were used alongside each other in the Germanophone world, with the Antiqua–Fraktur dispute often dividing along ideological or political lines. After the mid-20th century, Fraktur fell out of favor and Antiqua-based typefaces became the official standard in Germany. (In German, the term "Antiqua" refers to serif typefaces.)

Simon de Colines (c. 1480 – 1546) was a Parisian printer and one of the first printers of the French Renaissance. He was active in Paris as a printer and worked exclusively for the University of Paris from 1520 to 1546. In addition to his work as a printer, Colines worked as an editor, publisher, and punchcutter. Over the course of his lifetime, he published over 700 separate editions (almost 4% of books published in 16th-century Paris). Colines used elegant roman and italic types and a Greek type, with accents, that were superior to their predecessors. These are now called French old-style, a style that remained popular for over 200 years and revived in the early 20th century. He used rabbits, satyrs, and philosophers as his pressmark.

Didone (/diˈdoʊni/) is a genre of serif typeface that emerged in the late 18th century and was the standard style of general-purpose printing during the 19th century. It is characterized by:

• Narrow and unbracketed (hairline) serifs. (The serifs have a nearly constant width along their length.)
• Vertical orientation of weight axes. (The vertical strokes of letters are thick.)
• Strong contrast between thick and thin lines. (Horizontal parts of letters are thin in comparison to the vertical parts.)
• Some stroke endings show ball terminals. (Many lines end in a teardrop or circle shape, rather than a plain wedge-shaped serif.)
• An unornamented, "modern" appearance.

The term "Didone" is a 1954 coinage, part of the Vox-ATypI classification system. It amalgamates the surnames of the famous typefounders Firmin Didot and Giambattista Bodoni, whose efforts defined the style around the beginning of the nineteenth century. The category was known in the period of its greatest popularity as modern or modern face, in contrast to "old-style" or "old-face" designs, which date to the Renaissance period.

Baskerville is a serif typeface designed in 1757 by John Baskerville in Birmingham, England, and cut into metal by punchcutter John Handy. Baskerville is classified as a transitional typeface, intended as a refinement of what are now called old-style typefaces of the period, especially those of his most eminent contemporary, William Caslon.

Compared to earlier designs popular in Britain, Baskerville increased the contrast between thick and thin strokes, making the serifs sharper and more tapered, and shifted the axis of rounded letters to a more vertical position. The curved strokes are more circular in shape, and the characters became more regular. These changes created a greater consistency in size and form, influenced by the calligraphy Baskerville had learned and taught as a young man. Baskerville's typefaces remain very popular in book design and there are many modern revivals, which often add features such as bold type which did not exist in Baskerville's time.

The Song script (simplified Chinese: 宋体; traditional Chinese: 宋體) or Ming script (simplified Chinese: 明体; traditional Chinese: 明體) is a category of serifed typefaces used to display Chinese family of scripts such as traditional and simplified Chinese characters as well as their borrowed (e.g. Japanese kanji and Korean hanja) and radical-derived relatives (e.g. katagana). First invented during the Song dynasty and matured during the Ming dynasty, they are currently the most common printing and text display/editing fonts for Chinese and Japanese language publications.

The former term "Song" is the official terminology used in Mainland China, while the latter "Ming" is used prominently in Taiwan and Hong Kong and is a loanword from post-restoration Japan, as the typefaces are commonly called Mincho tai (Hiragana： みんちょうたい) and Myeongjo che (Hangul: 명조체) — both literally translate to "Ming dynasty font" — respectively in Japanese and Korean texts.

Claude Garamont (c. 1510–1561), known commonly as Claude Garamond, was a French type designer, publisher and punch-cutter based in Paris. Garamond worked as an engraver of punches, the masters used to stamp matrices, the moulds used to cast metal type. He worked in the tradition now called old-style serif design, which produced letters with a relatively organic structure resembling handwriting with a pen but with a slightly more structured and upright design. Considered one of the leading type designers of all time, he is recognised to this day for the elegance of his typefaces. Many old-style serif typefaces are collectively known as Garamond, named after the designer.

Garamond was one of the first independent punchcutters, specialising in type design and punch-cutting as a service to others rather than working in house for a specific printer. His career therefore helped to define the future of commercial printing with typefounding as a distinct industry to printing books.