Later on, in Font Quality, you will learn that most of today's fonts don't offer different type styles. There's just the basic typeface.

All the prevalent DTP programs support making a font electronically italic etc. The font weight is easily changed on a computer, without the need of corresponding type styles.

This is all very handy, but the quality is by far not as good compared to a specially designed type style.

Type styles are classified based on the:

Font weight


Type styles that are categorized based on line weight or font weight are called: 

Character Width


Type styles may also be categorized based on character width. There are the following categories: Extra Condensed, Condensed, Compressed, ... 

Font Style


There are also some categories that distinguish between different font styles - for exapmle: Regular,
Italic, Oblique, Slanted...