Thursday's roundup of typography-related articles and websites. This week, lesser-known fonts get some light thanks to Mirko Humbert's detailed explorations, and we spend a few hours/days playing with the infinite possibilities of characters' shapes.

Edifying reading

Font or Typeface? — Once and for all, let's learn the difference between the two with FontFeed expert Yves Peters.

Alternatives to your favourite Serif fonts — An excellent article and a few interesting fonts to discover. The descriptions and analysis are particularly detailed and precise.

Alternatives to your favourite Sans Serif fonts — The thrilling sequel of the above.

Drawing with type

These three flash-based websites offer the same interface: a plain white workspace and a choice of characters you can move, scale and rotate to create shapes and words exactly as you like it.

Lycette Tool — Available typefaces: Univers, Bodoni, Futura and Helvetica. This tool is great but I would have picked two serif and two sans. Well, that's just me.

Type is art — Create drawings from elements of characters (and learn all their pretty names again). This post's image comes from the gallery of the website.

Font Park — The link was sent to me by a kind reader (coucou Frédéric!), and it's certainly the richest tool you will find. It offers a wide range of Japanese characters, including kanji and hiragana, and lets you add latin characters in various Serif and Sans Serif fonts.