Blackletter in the context of "Roman type"

In typography, italic type is a cursive font based on a stylised form of calligraphic handwriting. Along with blackletter and roman type, it served as one of the major typefaces in the history of Western typography.

Owing to the influence from calligraphy, italics normally slant slightly to the right, like so. Different glyph shapes from roman type are usually used – another influence from calligraphy – and upper-case letters may have swashes, flourishes inspired by ornate calligraphy.

Rubrication is the addition of text in red ink to a manuscript for emphasis. Practitioners of rubrication, so-called rubricators or rubrishers, were specialized scribes who received text from the original scribe. Rubrication was one of several steps in the medieval process of manuscript making. The term comes from the Latin rubrīcāre, "to color red", the base word being ruber, "red". The practice began in pharaonic Egypt with scribes emphasizing important text, such as headings, new parts of a narrative, etc., on papyri with red ink.

Pound is a name of various units of currency. It is used in some countries today and previously was used in many others. The English word "pound" derives from the Latin expression lībra pondō, "a pound by weight", in which lībra means 'scale' or 'balance' and pondō means 'pound' or 'weight'. The currency's symbol is '£', a stylised form of the blackletter 'L' (${\displaystyle {\mathfrak {L}}}$) (from libra), crossed to indicate abbreviation.

The term was adopted in England from the weight of silver used to make 240 pennies, and eventually spread to British colonies all over the world. Although silver penny mintage began seven centuries earlier, the first pound coin was minted under Henry VII in 1489.

In cryptography, a cipher (or cypher) is an algorithm for performing encryption or decryption—a series of well-defined steps that can be followed as a procedure. An alternative, less common term is encipherment. To encipher or encode is to convert information into cipher or code. In common parlance, "cipher" is synonymous with "code", as they are both a set of steps that encrypt a message; however, the concepts are distinct in cryptography, especially classical cryptography.

Codes generally substitute different length strings of characters in the output, while ciphers generally substitute the same number of characters as are input. A code maps one meaning with another. Words and phrases can be coded as letters or numbers. Codes typically have direct meaning from input to key. Codes primarily function to save time. Ciphers are algorithmic. The given input must follow the cipher's process to be solved. Ciphers are commonly used to encrypt written information.

Carolingian minuscule or Caroline minuscule is a script which developed as a calligraphic standard in the medieval European period as part of an overall effort to create a clear, uniform, and consistent manner by which to copy books. Multiple abbeys had begun to experiment with improvements to earlier Merovingian cursive scripts, with one version of an early Caroline script being developed at the scriptorium of the Benedictine monks of Corbie Abbey, about 150 kilometres (95 miles) north of Paris. The development and adoption of an improved minuscule script was slow and occurred across many locations throughout the Carolingian empire, although a later version of Caroline minuscule developed at the scriptoria of Tours and used in the creation of widely distributed bibles and Gospel books helped to contribute to an overall Caroline minuscule standard. Further adoption was encouraged by the issuance of imperial capitularies, with the script continuing to spread throughout the Holy Roman Empire and beyond, ultimately replacing Insular script in Britain and Ireland in the eleventh and twelfth centuries as well as Visigothic script in the Iberian peninsula.

Carolingian minuscule subsequently evolved in the tenth and eleventh centuries into a script which became known as blackletter or Gothic script, with the Carolingian minuscule becoming increasingly obsolete until the fourteenth century and the Italian Renaissance, when a script modeled on it and known as humanist minuscule script was developed. Through this later script the Carolingian minuscule can be seen as a direct ancestor of most modern-day Latin letter scripts and typefaces such as Times New Roman.

Fraktur (German: [fʁakˈtuːɐ̯] ) is a calligraphic hand of the Latin alphabet and any of several blackletter typefaces derived from this hand. It is designed such that the beginnings and ends of the individual strokes that make up each letter will be clearly visible, and often emphasized; in this way it is often contrasted with the curves of the Antiqua (common) typefaces where the letters are designed to flow and strokes connect together in a continuous fashion. The word "Fraktur" derives from Latin frāctūra ("a break"), built from frāctus, passive participle of frangere ("to break"), which is also the root for the English word "fracture". In non-professional contexts, the term "Fraktur" is sometimes misused to refer to all blackletter typefaces – while Fraktur typefaces do fall under that category, not all blackletter typefaces exhibit the Fraktur characteristics described above.

Modern typographers view typography as a craft with a very long history tracing its origins back to the first punches and dies used to make seals and coinage currency in ancient times. The basic elements of typography are at least as old as civilization and the earliest writing systems—a series of key developments that were eventually drawn together into one systematic craft. While woodblock printing and movable type had precedents in East Asia, typography in the Western world developed after the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in the mid-15th century. The initial spread of printing throughout Germany and Italy led to the enduring legacy and continued use of blackletter, roman, and italic types.