Today, some typefaces are so well respected they even have their own online forums with spoof music videos made in honour of their legibility; others have become the focus for documentary films highlighting their popularity. "Helvetica", for example, is a feature-length film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture, demonstrating how typefaces affect our lives. "Helvetica" has been shown at over 200 film festivals, museums, design conferences and cinemas across the globe. Quite an accolade for a 50-year old design.

If you don't know the difference between a font and a typeface, or even if you are a glyph geek, typography is a realm that should be explored with more enthusiasm if you really want to give your documents that extra polish. And with the launch of Word 2010, it's good to know that there are now advanced text-formatting features that include a range of ligature settings and a choice of stylistic sets and number forms which you can understand and access with ease. These new features are available with any of the OpenType fonts to help you obtain that extra level of font finesse.

OpenType, as the new industry standard, supports Unicode, which means that fonts now support a large number of characters. While PostScript fonts are limited to a maximum of only 256 characters, OpenType fonts can have more than 65,000. This means that you no longer need to have separate fonts for Western, Central European, Baltic, Cyrillic or Greek languages, but that you can have one single file which supports all these encodings; and OpenType can contain multiple alphabets such as Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic; or even special fonts for Japanese text.

OpenType fonts also include typographic refinements such as true small caps, different styles of figures, and extensive sets of ligatures and alternates, as well as complete sets of accented characters and diacritical marks. Different applications have differing levels of support for all the OpenType features.

Ligatures give your document a professional typeset look by combining character pairs. The most common and best example of a ligature is the ampersand (&). The ampersand was originally a ligature of E and t, forming the Latin word "et", meaning "and". Like many other ligatures, it has at times been thought of as one letter, and in most fonts it does not immediately resemble the two letters used to form it, although certain typefaces (such as Trebuchet MS) design & in the form of a ligature.

In Word 2010 you can exercise these typography capabilities in many OpenType fonts. For example, you can explore the OpenType typography features in existing fonts such as Calibri, Corbel and Cambria. Or try Gabriola, a new font in Office 2010 that offers a rich array of Stylistic Sets.

To enable OpenType ligatures in Word 2010, right-click on some text, select Font, select the Advanced tab, and select Standard Only from the Ligatures box. This enables the standard ligatures, such as in the use of fi and ffi.

The OpenType standard specifies four categories of ligatures, but the font designer decides which to support and in which group to put any given combination of characters. The following descriptions apply to each type of ligature that might be used:

Standard Only: The standard set of ligatures varies by language, but it contains the ligatures that most typographers and font designers agree are appropriate.

Standard and Contextual: Contextual ligatures are ones that the font designer believes are appropriate for use with that font, but they are not standard. The combination of standard and contextual ligatures gives you the set of ligatures that the font designer thought appropriate for common usage.

Historical and Discretionary: Historical forms are ligatures that were once standard but are no longer commonly used. Discretionary ligatures are those that the font designer included for specific purposes.

All: All ligature combinations that are available for a font are applied to the text.

Depending on the font that you're using, you can select from available stylistic sets and number forms to add flair to your documents. For example, you can change the number spacing allowing more control over the appearance and layout of numbers in your text and number spacing alternatives.

Number spacing options can be set to Default, where the number spacing is specified by the font designer of each font; or to Proportional, where numbers are spaced more like letters, with varying widths, for example, an 8 is wider than a 1.

This spacing is easier to read in text. Candara, Constantia and Corbel are three of the Microsoft fonts that use proportional spacing by default. In Tabular options, each number has the same width. This means that in a table column, for example, all three-digit numbers will align. Tabular spacing is also useful for calculations. Cambria, Calibri and Consolas are three of the Microsoft OpenType fonts with tabular spacing by default.

You can change the look of your document by applying a different stylistic set to your text. A font designer may include up to 20 stylistic sets in a given font, and each stylistic set may include any subset of the characters of the font. For example, if your text is formatted as Gabriola, you can choose between seven stylistic sets, each of which changes the formatting of each of the characters in your text. When a stylistic set contains other features, such as contextual alternates, those features are activated as part of selecting that stylistic set.

Select the Use contextual alternates option to provide fine-tuning of letters or combinations of letters based on the surrounding characters. This tool helps to make script look more natural and flowing. You can also use contextual alternates to provide specific letter forms at the start or end of words, next to punctuation, or at the end of paragraphs. Some fonts include contextual alternates for whole words, such as of and the. Word 2010 does not support contextual alternates for the end of a line that is followed by an automatic page break.

If you want to disable these OpenType features, simply open Word Options, select the Advanced tab, and check Disable OpenType Font Formatting Features under the Layout Options that are right at the bottom.

Incidentally, a font is the style associated with each typeface: for example the size and style, etc. The typeface is just one aspect of the font and relates to the design of the letters, numbers and symbols that make up a design of type; for example, Arial or Times Roman. And a glyph geek - well, that would require another article - and a willing glyph geek - to explain!