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37-470: The original release of Gentium defined roughly 1,500 glyphs covering almost all of the range of Latin characters used worldwide, as well as monotonic and polytonic Greek , designed to flow in harmony with the Latin. Gentium comes with a variant called GentiumAlt ("Gentium Alternative"), which contains flatter diacritics intended to improve the appearance of letters with multiple diacritics, as well as

74-455: A majuscule script commonly used from the 3rd to 8th centuries AD by Latin and Greek scribes. Tironian notes were a shorthand system consisting of thousands of signs. New Roman cursive script, also known as minuscule cursive, was in use from the 3rd century to the 7th century, and uses letter forms that are more recognizable to modern eyes; ⟨a⟩ , ⟨b⟩ , ⟨d⟩ , and ⟨e⟩ had taken

111-464: A boldface weight for general applications in the interim while the full bold and bold italic character set is developed. An updated version of the roman and italic fonts called Gentium Plus , which includes the full extended Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic coverage, was released in November 2010. Gentium Plus variants containing an additional 3,800 glyphs, including Cyrillic and additional coverage of

148-466: A character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface , of an element of written language. A grapheme , or part of a grapheme (such as a diacritic ), or sometimes several graphemes in combination (a composed glyph) can be represented by a glyph. In most languages written in any variety of the Latin alphabet except English, the use of diacritics to signify a sound mutation

185-784: A glyph variant of the Greek circumflex that resembles an inverted breve . In 2003, the Gentium font was awarded a Certificate of Excellence in Type Design from the Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI) as one of the best designs of the previous five years. In November 2007, the Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic fonts were released, containing Gentium fonts in four faces: regular, italic, bold, and bold italic. Gentium Basic has

222-578: A more familiar shape, and the other letters were proportionate to each other. This script evolved into a variety of regional medieval scripts (for example, the Merovingian , Visigothic and Benevantan scripts), to be later supplanted by the Carolingian minuscule . It was not until the Middle Ages that the letter ⟨ W ⟩ (originally a ligature of two ⟨ V ⟩ s)

259-483: A unit of writing, and the choice between them depends on context or on the preference of the author, they now have to be treated as separate glyphs, because mechanical arrangements have to be available to differentiate between them and to print whichever of them is required. In computing as well as typography, the term " character " refers to a grapheme or grapheme-like unit of text, as found in natural language writing systems ( scripts ). In typography and computing,

296-497: Is common. For example, the grapheme ⟨à⟩ requires two glyphs: the basic a and the grave accent ` . In general, a diacritic is regarded as a glyph, even if it is contiguous with the rest of the character like a cedilla in French , Catalan or Portuguese , the ogonek in several languages, or the stroke on a Polish " Ł ". Although these marks originally had no independent meaning, they have since acquired meaning in

333-512: Is standardised as the ISO basic Latin alphabet . The term Latin alphabet may refer to either the alphabet used to write Latin (as described in this article) or other alphabets based on the Latin script , which is the basic set of letters common to the various alphabets descended from the classical Latin alphabet, such as the English alphabet . These Latin-script alphabets may discard letters, like

370-579: Is today transcribed Lūciī a fīliī was written ⟨ lv́ciꟾ·a·fꟾliꟾ ⟩ in the inscription depicted. Some letters have more than one form in epigraphy . Latinists have treated some of them especially such as ⟨ Ꟶ ⟩ , a variant of ⟨H⟩ found in Roman Gaul . The primary mark of punctuation was the interpunct , which was used as a word divider , though it fell out of use after 200 AD. Old Roman cursive script, also called majuscule cursive and capitalis cursive,

407-529: The African reference alphabet . Although Latin did not use diacritical marks, signs of truncation of words (often placed above or at the end of the truncated word) were very common. Furthermore, abbreviations or smaller overlapping letters were often used. This was due to the fact that if the text was engraved on stone, the number of letters to be written was reduced, while if it was written on paper or parchment, it saved precious space. This habit continued even in

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444-562: The Roman alphabet , is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language . Largely unaltered excepting several letters splitting—i.e. ⟨J⟩ from ⟨I⟩ , and ⟨U⟩ from ⟨V⟩ —additions such as ⟨W⟩ , and extensions such as letters with diacritics , it forms the Latin script that is used to write most languages of modern Europe , Africa , America and Oceania . Its basic modern inventory

481-702: The Rotokas alphabet , or add new letters, like the Danish and Norwegian alphabets. Letter shapes have evolved over the centuries, including the development in Medieval Latin of lower-case , forms which did not exist in the Classical period alphabet. The Latin alphabet evolved from the visually similar Etruscan alphabet , which evolved from the Cumaean Greek version of the Greek alphabet , which

518-542: The age of colonialism and Christian evangelism , the Latin script spread beyond Europe , coming into use for writing indigenous American , Australian , Austronesian , Austroasiatic and African languages . More recently, linguists have also tended to prefer the Latin script or the International Phonetic Alphabet (itself largely based on the Latin script) when transcribing or creating written standards for non-European languages, such as

555-565: The " ß " in German may be regarded as glyphs. They were originally typographic ligatures , but over time have become characters in their own right; these languages treat them as unique letters. However, a ligature such as "fi", that is treated in some typefaces as a single unit, is arguably not a glyph as this is just a design choice of that typeface, essentially an allographic feature, and includes more than one grapheme . In normal handwriting, even long words are often written "joined up", without

592-460: The Gentium Plus family, as well as the creation of a "Gentium Book Plus" family with a slightly heavier weight which may be useful at small sizes. These are the weights that are currently available in the Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic fonts. Variant forms of many characters can be chosen in the word-processor. For example, for primer -style 'a' and 'g', append ss01=1 to the name of

629-471: The IPA, were added in 2010 in a release called Gentium Plus . Released shortly afterward was a variant called "Gentium Plus Compact", which has compact spacing for aesthetic reasons. Both Gentium Plus and Gentium Plus Compact include regular and italic variants of over 5500 glyphs. Since the initial release of the Gentium Plus fonts, the focus of the project has shifted to completing bold and bold italic weights of

666-831: The Middle Ages. Hundreds of symbols and abbreviations exist, varying from century to century. It is generally believed that the Latin alphabet used by the Romans was derived from the Old Italic alphabet used by the Etruscans . That alphabet was derived from the Euboean alphabet used by the Cumae , which in turn was derived from the Phoenician alphabet . Latin included 21 different characters. The letter ⟨C⟩

703-549: The Romans did not use the traditional ( Semitic -derived) names as in Greek: the names of the plosives were formed by adding /eː/ to their sound (except for ⟨K⟩ and ⟨Q⟩ , which needed different vowels to be distinguished from ⟨C⟩ ) and the names of the continuants consisted as a rule either of the bare sound, or the sound preceded by /e/ . The letter ⟨Y⟩ when introduced

740-527: The alphabet. From then on, ⟨G⟩ represented the voiced plosive /ɡ/ , while ⟨C⟩ was generally reserved for the voiceless plosive /k/ . The letter ⟨K⟩ was used only rarely, in a small number of words such as Kalendae , often interchangeably with ⟨C⟩ . After the Roman conquest of Greece in the 1st century BC, Latin adopted the Greek letters ⟨Y⟩ and ⟨Z⟩ (or readopted, in

777-507: The field of mathematics and computing, for instance. Conversely, in the languages of Western Europe, the dot on a lower-case ⟨i⟩ is not a glyph in itself because it does not convey any distinction, and an ⟨ı⟩ in which the dot has been accidentally omitted is still likely to be recognized correctly. However, in Turkish and adjacent languages, this dot is a glyph because that language has two distinct versions of

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814-673: The font in the font-selection window. (Features are appended with a colon and linked with an ampersand – see images at right.) Alternatively, customized versions of the fonts can be created with TypeTuner , prior to download, that have those forms preset. Features that may be chosen include small capitals , primer-style 'a' and 'g', roman-style 'a' and 'g' in italic typeface, variant forms of capital 'Ŋ', large modifier letter apostrophe and saltillo , Vietnamese-style diacritics, Serbian-style italics (in Cyrillic), staveless tone letters , and automatic fractions. The ongoing development of

851-540: The font welcomes contributions from its users. Gentium was released under the Open Font License on November 28, 2005. Older typefaces that support the same character inventory, and also released under the OFL, are Charis SIL and Doulos SIL . Glyph A glyph ( / ɡ l ɪ f / GLIF ) is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography , a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of

888-534: The fragmentation of political power, the style of writing changed and varied greatly throughout the Middle Ages, even after the invention of the printing press . Early deviations from the classical forms were the uncial script , a development of the Old Roman cursive , and various so-called minuscule scripts that developed from New Roman cursive , of which the insular script developed by Irish literati and derivations of this, such as Carolingian minuscule were

925-457: The latter case) to write Greek loanwords, placing them at the end of the alphabet. An attempt by the emperor Claudius to introduce three additional letters did not last. Thus it was during the classical Latin period that the Latin alphabet contained 21 letters and 2 foreign letters: The Latin names of some of these letters are disputed; for example, ⟨H⟩ may have been called [ˈaha] or [ˈaka] . In general

962-498: The letter i , with and without a dot . In Japanese syllabaries , some of the characters are made up of more than one separate mark, but in general these separate marks are not glyphs because they have no meaning by themselves. However, in some cases, additional marks fulfil the role of diacritics , to differentiate distinct characters. Such additional marks constitute glyphs. Some characters such as " æ " in Icelandic and

999-426: The most influential, introducing the lower case forms of the letters, as well as other writing conventions that have since become standard. The languages that use the Latin script generally use capital letters to begin paragraphs and sentences and proper nouns . The rules for capitalization have changed over time, and different languages have varied in their rules for capitalization. Old English , for example,

1036-400: The pen leaving the paper, and the form of each written letter will often vary depending on which letters precede and follow it, but that does not make the whole word into a single glyph. Older models of typewriters required the use of multiple glyphs to depict a single character, as an overstruck apostrophe and period to create an exclamation mark . If there is more than one allograph of

1073-461: The range of graphemes is broader than in a written language in other ways too: a typeface often has to cope with a range of different languages each of which contribute their own graphemes, and it may also be required to print non-linguistic symbols such as dingbats . The range of glyphs required increases correspondingly. In summary, in typography and computing, a glyph is a graphical unit. Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet , also known as

1110-404: The same weight as the previous Gentium fonts, while Gentium Book Basic is set at a slightly heavier weight for use in publishing books at small point sizes, or under certain printing conditions. While these fonts contain bold and bold italic variants, they do not contain the full range of glyphs, especially most Greek letters. These fonts are said to be in beta testing and are intended to provide

1147-486: The various letters see Latin spelling and pronunciation ; for the names of the letters in English see English alphabet . Diacritics were not regularly used, but they did occur sometimes, the most common being the apex used to mark long vowels , which had previously sometimes been written doubled. However, in place of taking an apex, the letter i was written taller : ⟨ á é ꟾ ó v́ ⟩ . For example, what

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1184-527: Was added to the Latin alphabet, to represent sounds from the Germanic languages which did not exist in medieval Latin, and only after the Renaissance did the convention of treating ⟨ I ⟩ and ⟨ U ⟩ as vowels , and ⟨ J ⟩ and ⟨ V ⟩ as consonants , become established. Prior to that, the former had been merely allographs of the latter. With

1221-512: Was itself descended from the Phoenician alphabet , which in turn derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs . The Etruscans ruled early Rome ; their alphabet evolved in Rome over successive centuries to produce the Latin alphabet. During the Middle Ages , the Latin alphabet was used (sometimes with modifications) for writing Romance languages , which are direct descendants of Latin , as well as Celtic , Germanic , Baltic and some Slavic languages . With

1258-419: Was probably called "hy" /hyː/ as in Greek, the name upsilon not being in use yet, but this was changed to i Graeca ("Greek i") as Latin speakers had difficulty distinguishing its foreign sound /y/ from /i/ . ⟨Z⟩ was given its Greek name, zeta . This scheme has continued to be used by most modern European languages that have adopted the Latin alphabet. For the Latin sounds represented by

1295-663: Was rarely written with even proper nouns capitalized, whereas Modern English writers and printers of the 17th and 18th century frequently capitalized most and sometimes all nouns; for example, from the preamble of the United States Constitution : We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote

1332-445: Was the everyday form of handwriting used for writing letters, by merchants writing business accounts, by schoolchildren learning the Latin alphabet, and even emperors issuing commands. A more formal style of writing was based on Roman square capitals , but cursive was used for quicker, informal writing. It was most commonly used from about the 1st century BC to the 3rd century, but it probably existed earlier than that. It led to Uncial ,

1369-439: Was the western form of the Greek gamma , but it was used for the sounds /ɡ/ and /k/ alike, possibly under the influence of Etruscan , which might have lacked any voiced plosives . Later, probably during the 3rd century BC, the letter ⟨Z⟩ – not needed to write Latin properly – was replaced with the new letter ⟨G⟩ , a ⟨C⟩ modified with a small vertical stroke, which took its place in

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