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Although people in many parts of the world share common alphabets and numeral systems (versions of the Latin writing system are used throughout the Americas, Australia, and much of Europe and Africa; the Arabic numerals are nearly universal), styles of handwritten letterforms vary between individuals, and sometimes also vary systematically between regions.
The handwritten numerals used in Western countries have two common forms:
Aside from these two main forms, other regional variations abound.
The numeral 0: Some writers put a diagonal slash through the numeral 0 (zero), a practice that was used on some early, low-resolution computer terminals which displayed a slashed "zero" glyph to distinguish it from the capital letter O. This practice conflicts with the use of the letter "Ø" in the Danish and Norwegian languages. Forms that avoid this confusion include:
Confusion between the numeral 0 and the letter O can also be resolved by using a script letter O (with a loop at the top). [1]
The numeral 1: This numeral is sometimes written with a serif at the top extending downward and to the left. People in some parts of Europe extend this stroke nearly the whole distance to the baseline. It is sometimes written with a horizontal serif at the base; without the serif it can resemble the shape of the numeral 7, which has a near-vertical stroke without a crossbar, and a shorter horizontal top stroke. This numeral is often written as a plain vertical line without an ear at the top; this form is easily confused with a capital I, a lower-case L, and a vertical bar |. [2]
The numeral 2: In the U.S., Germany and Austria, a curly version used to be taught and is still used by many in handwriting. This too can be confused with a capital script Q, or the letter Z. It appears as ੨.
The numeral 3: This numeral is sometimes written with a flat top, similar to the character Ʒ (ezh). This form is sometimes used to prevent people from fraudulently changing a three into an eight (but introduces the potential for confusion with ezh or with cursive Z).
The numeral 4: Some people leave the top "open": all the lines are either vertical or horizontal, as in a seven-segment display. This makes it easier to distinguish from the numeral 9. Whether the horizontal bar terminates at or crosses the right vertical bar is insignificant in the West, but to be distinguished from certain Chinese characters (particularly 丩), it must cross.
The numeral 5: In Taiwan, the left vertical bar is extended upwards as a long stem. If this is slanted, the overall figure may more closely resemble an uppercase Y. If casually written it can be confused with the letter S.
The numeral 6: Can be confused with a letter capital G, or the lowercase b, or the nine if inverted. [3] In situations where the number 6 may appear at various angles (such as on billiard balls, some styles of playing cards and dice), it can be underlined (appearing as 6) or followed by a full stop (appearing as 6.) to indicate the proper viewing angle to disambiguate between 6 and 9; a 9 may or may not appear with similar underlining or full stop (as 9 or 9.). It can also be written with a straight line rather than a right-curling ascender on top, appearing as b.
The numeral 7: The traditional form found in copperplate penmanship begins with a serif at the upper left and has a wavy horizontal stroke (like a swash). In East Asian countries (Korea, China and Japan), this numeral is commonly written with such a serif, but no swash and no crossbar through the middle. It is usually written with just two strokes, the top horizontal and the (usually angled) vertical. A short horizontal bar is sometimes used to cross the vertical in the middle, to distinguish the seven from a numeral one, especially in cultures (such as French) that write 1 with a very long upstroke. This form is used commonly throughout continental Europe, parts of the United States and frequently in Australia. In Taiwan two horizontal bars are sometimes used, although an extra-long serif is the feature which most clearly distinguishes 7 from 1. When the cross is added in the center it can cause confusion with a script capital F.
The numeral 8: Some people write this numeral like two circles. Other people write this numeral in one continuous motion, which makes it look like two tear drops or a sideways lemniscate.
The numeral 9: In parts of Europe, this numeral is written with the vertical ending in a hook at the bottom. This version resembles how the lowercase g is commonly written ( 
). Elsewhere the usual shape is to draw the vertical straight to the baseline. A nine may or may not appear with underlining or full stop (as 9 or 9.) in order to avoid confusion with 6. In China, southern Taiwan, and South Korea, the nine is sometimes written with the loop to the left of the stick, resembling a lowercase "q" with the loop on the cap line.
The lowercase letter a: This letter is often handwritten as the single-storey "ɑ" (a circle and a vertical line adjacent to the right of the circle) instead of the double-storey "a" found in many fonts. (See: A#Typographic variants)
The lowercase letter g: In Polish, this letter is often rendered with a straight descender without a hook or loop. This effectively means that a handwritten g looks much like a q in other writing traditions. The letter q, which is only used in foreign words and is extremely rare, is then disambiguated from g by adding a serif (often undulated) extending to the right from the bottom tip of the descender.
The lowercase letter p: The French way of writing this character has a half-way ascender as the vertical extension of the descender, which also does not complete the bowl at the bottom. In early Finnish writing, the curve to the bottom was omitted, thus the resulting letter resembled an n with a descender (like ꞃ).
The lowercase letter q: In block letters, some Europeans like to cross the descender to prevent confusion with the numeral 9, which also can be written with a straight stem. In North America the descender often ends with a hook curving up to the right ( 
). In Polish, the lowercase q is disambiguated from g by a serif extending from the bottom tip of the descender to the right.
The lowercase letter s: See long s.
The lowercase letters u and v: These letters have a common origin and were once written according to the location in the word rather than the sound. The v came first; the u originally had a loop extending to the left and was only used to start words. All other locations for either u or v were written with the latter. In Germany (especially southern Germany), Austria and Switzerland, lowercase u is often written with a horizontal stroke or swish over it (ŭ, ū, ũ), to distinguish it from n. (cf. German orthography#handwritten umlauts)
The uppercase letter I: This letter is often written with one stroke on the top of the letter and one on the bottom. This distinguishes it from the lowercase letter l, and the numeral 1, which is often written as a straight line without the ear.
The uppercase letter J: In Germany, this letter is often written with a long stroke to the left at the top. This is to distinguish it from the capital letter "I".
The uppercase letter S: In Japan, this letter is often written with a single serif added to the end of the stroke.
The uppercase letter Z: This letter is usually written with three strokes. In parts of Europe such as Italy, Germany and Spain, it is commonly written with a short horizontal crossbar added through the middle. This version is sometimes preferred in mathematics to help distinguish it from the numeral 2. In Polish, the character Ƶ is used as an allographic variant of the letter Ż. In Japan it is often written with a short diagonal crossbar through the middle ( 
). [4] In France, it is often written with a loop at the bottom.
The lowercase letter z: In the cursive style used in the United States and most Australian states (excluding South Australia), this letter is written as an ezh (ʒ). [5] [6]
German Kurrent and its modernized 20th-century school version Sütterlin , the form of handwriting taught in schools and generally used in Germany and Austria until it was banned by the Nazis in 1941, was very different from that used in other European countries. However, it was generally only used for German words. Any foreign words included in the text would usually be written in the "normal" script, which was called the lateinische Schrift (Latin script) in German.
Slant is the predominant angle of the downward stroke in handwriting based on Latin script. The slant of a sample of writing is a feature of many regional handwriting variations, and also a reflection of the copybook that is taught.
A, or a, is the first letter and the first vowel letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is a, plural aes.
Digamma or wau is an archaic letter of the Greek alphabet. It originally stood for the sound but it has remained in use principally as a Greek numeral for 6. Whereas it was originally called waw or wau, its most common appellation in classical Greek is digamma; as a numeral, it was called episēmon during the Byzantine era and is now known as stigma after the Byzantine ligature combining σ-τ as ϛ.
Epsilon is the fifth letter of the Greek alphabet, corresponding phonetically to a mid front unrounded vowel IPA:[e̞] or IPA:[ɛ̝]. In the system of Greek numerals it also has the value five. It was derived from the Phoenician letter He . Letters that arose from epsilon include the Roman E, Ë and Ɛ, and Cyrillic Е, È, Ё, Є and Э.
Q, or q, is the seventeenth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is pronounced, most commonly spelled cue, but also kew, kue and que.
Type design is the art and process of designing typefaces. This involves drawing each letterform using a consistent style. The basic concepts and design variables are described below.
Koppa or qoppa is a letter that was used in early forms of the Greek alphabet, derived from Phoenician qoph (𐤒). It was originally used to denote the sound, but dropped out of use as an alphabetic character and replaced by Kappa (Κ). It has remained in use as a numeral symbol (90) in the system of Greek numerals, although with a modified shape. Koppa is the source of Latin Q, as well as the Cyrillic numeral sign of the same name (Koppa).
Ezh, also called the "tailed z", is a letter, notable for its use in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to represent the voiced postalveolar fricative consonant. For example, the pronunciation of "si" in vision and precision, or the ⟨s⟩ in treasure. See also the letter ⟨Ž⟩ as used in many Slavic languages, the Persian alphabet letter ⟨ژ⟩, the Cyrillic letter ⟨Ж⟩, and the Esperanto letter ⟨Ĵ⟩.
Blackletter, also known as Gothic script, Gothic minuscule or Gothic type, was a script used throughout Western Europe from approximately 1150 until the 17th century. It continued to be commonly used for Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish until the 1870s, Finnish until the turn of the 20th century, Latvian until the 1930s, and for the German language until the 1940s, when Hitler officially discontinued it in 1941. Fraktur is a notable script of this type, and sometimes the entire group of blackletter faces is referred to as Fraktur. Blackletter is sometimes referred to as Old English, but it is not to be confused with the Old English language, which predates blackletter by many centuries and was written in the insular script or in Futhorc. Along with Italic type and Roman type, blackletter served as one of the major typefaces in the history of Western typography.
I is a letter used in almost all Cyrillic alphabets with the exception of Belarusian.
Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals and smaller lowercase in the written representation of certain languages. The writing systems that distinguish between the upper- and lowercase have two parallel sets of letters: each in the majuscule set has a counterpart in the minuscule set. Some counterpart letters have the same shape, and differ only in size, but for others the shapes are different. The two case variants are alternative representations of the same letter: they have the same name and pronunciation and are typically treated identically when sorting in alphabetical order.
De is a letter of the Cyrillic script. It commonly represents the voiced dental stop, like the pronunciation of ⟨d⟩ in "door", except closer to the teeth. De is usually romanised using the Latin letter D.
There are various stylistic and typographic variations to the Arabic numeral system.
The dotted or slashed zero 0̷ is a representation of the Arabic digit "0" (zero) with a slash through it. The slashed zero glyph is often used to distinguish the digit "zero" ("0") from the Latin script letter "O" anywhere that the distinction needs emphasis, particularly in encoding systems, scientific and engineering applications, computer programming, and telecommunications. It thus helps to differentiate characters that would otherwise be homoglyphs. It was commonly used during the punch card era, when programs were typically written out by hand, to avoid ambiguity when the character was later typed on a card punch.
In orthography and typography, a homoglyph is one of two or more graphemes, characters, or glyphs with shapes that appear identical or very similar but may have differing meaning. The designation is also applied to sequences of characters sharing these properties.
Ƶ is a letter of the Latin alphabet, derived from Z with the addition of a stroke through the center.
L, or l, is the twelfth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is el, plural els.
The Latin script is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world. It is the standard script of the English language and is often referred to simply as "the alphabet" in English. It is a true alphabet which originated in the 7th century BC in Italy and has changed continually over the last 2,500 years. It has roots in the Semitic alphabet and its offshoot alphabets, the Phoenician, Greek, and Etruscan. The phonetic values of some letters changed, some letters were lost and gained, and several writing styles ("hands") developed. Two such styles, the minuscule and majuscule hands, were combined into one script with alternate forms for the lower and upper case letters. Modern uppercase letters differ only slightly from their classical counterparts, and there are few regional variants.
The modern numerical digit 0 is usually written as a circle, an ellipse or a rounded square or rectangle.
Typeface anatomy describes the graphic elements that make up letters in a typeface.
Typefaces are born from the struggle between rules and results. Squeezing a square about 1% helps it look more like a square; to appear the same height as a square, a circle must be measurably taller. The two strokes in an X aren't the same thickness, nor are their parallel edges actually parallel; the vertical stems of a lowercase alphabet are thinner than those of its capitals; the ascender on a d isn't the same length as the descender on a p, and so on. For the rational mind, type design can be a maddening game of drawing things differently in order to make them appear the same.
Aptos, originally named Bierstadt, is a sans-serif typeface in the neo-grotesque style developed by Steve Matteson. It was released in 2023 as the new default font for the Microsoft Office suite, replacing the previously used Calibri font.