karakterskrift

Karakterskrift is a term used in Nordic discussions of typography and writing systems to refer to the script or typeface used to represent characters in written text. The concept covers both the visual design of glyphs and the linguistic or orthographic conventions that govern a script.

In typography, karakterskrift describes the visual form of a character set: the shapes of letters and numbers, the use of serifs or sans, the treatment of diacritics, ligatures, and kerning. It determines how readable or expressive a text appears on a page or screen.

In linguistics and digital text, the term can denote the writing system or script used by a language, such as Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic, Devanagari, or Han, along with the rules that govern their orthography. The same script may be rendered in many karakterskrifter, i.e., fonts, that differ in style while encoding the same characters.

Fonts and rendering technologies realize a karakterskrift by mapping characters to glyphs and by implementing typographic features. In digital contexts, Unicode provides code points for characters, and font designers supply the glyph shapes for a given karakterskrift.

Outside technical contexts, karakterskrift is sometimes used in branding or design to refer to a chosen font style to convey a particular mood or identity.