D

Descender

Part of some lowercase characters that drops below the baseline. For example a lowercase 'y'.

See also: Ascender, Baseline

Dingbats

extend. wingdings
A non-standard, ornamental or illustrative font. These symbols are generally sold as sets of fonts, the most common of which is Zapf Dingbats. Microsoft's version of dingbats is called Wingdings and comes bundled with the Windows operating system.

Discretionary hyphen

A word breaking hyphen that occurs only if the word appears at the end of a line of text, but not if the word appears in the middle of a line.

Display fonts

extend. display type
Display fonts are those that are designed to be used for on-screen use, rather than for printed reproduction. Fonts such as Verdana and Trebuchet, for example, were specifically designed for use on web sites as they are extremely readable on computer screens.

See also: Printer fonts

Drop cap

extend. initial cap, elevated cap
The first letter of a paragraph of type that is larger than the rest of the body copy. Usually drops into the lines of type beneath it, but can also extend above, in which case it is usually referred to as an 'elevated cap'.