texttype

Texttype is a term that can refer to several related concepts involving written text. In typography, text type describes typefaces designed for body text and long passages. Such text types prioritize legibility at smaller sizes and longer line lengths, and are commonly contrasted with display types used for headlines. Styles are typically classified as serif or sans-serif, with variations such as humanist, transitional, and grotesque.

In computing and information technology, text type denotes data that encodes characters rather than numbers or binary data. This sense is commonly realized as strings or text fields in programming languages. Text types may be immutable or mutable, and are defined with character encodings such as ASCII or Unicode to support international characters. Operations include concatenation, searching, and normalization.

In databases and data modeling, a text type is a column data type used to store textual data. Common implementations include VARCHAR, TEXT, CLOB, or equivalent, each with different maximum lengths, storage behavior, and collation rules. Text types interact with encoding, collation, and indexing considerations that affect performance and correctness.

In internationalization and processing, text handling involves normalization to standard Unicode forms, case folding, and locale-aware sorting. Grapheme boundaries, combining characters, and bidirectional text pose particular challenges for consistent rendering and comparison.

Etymologically, the term combines 'text' (woven words) with 'type' (movable type), reflecting the historical development of printed and digital text. See also string data type, typography, and Unicode.