lettersfont

Lettersfont is a term used in typography to refer to the subset of a typeface that governs the design of the alphabetic characters—uppercase and lowercase letters—along with their diacritics and ligatures. The term is informal and not part of formal typographic taxonomy; it is sometimes used to distinguish the letterforms from digits, punctuation, and other glyphs within a font. In practice, a typeface comprises glyphs for letters, numbers, symbols, and more, but the lettersfont is the primary driver of a font’s visual identity.

Design considerations for the lettersfont include x-height, cap height, the proportions of ascenders and descenders, and stroke contrast. Serif and sans-serif styles produce different optical impressions, affecting readability and tone. Kerning and letter-spacing, as well as the harmony between uppercase and lowercase forms, influence legibility in longer text and the perceived personality of branding materials. The lettersfont also requires adequate coverage of language-specific diacritics and, where applicable, ligatures or stylistic alternates to support diverse texts.

In digital typography, the lettersfont interacts with rendering technologies such as hinting, anti-aliasing, and color font features. Modern workflows often use variable fonts to adjust weight, width, and optical size within a single font file, affecting how the lettersfont performs at different sizes and media.

See also: typography, font, typeface, kerning, ligature, variable font, sans-serif, serif.