- beginning of sentence:
- end of sentence:
- opening parenthesis:
- closing parenthesis:
- in that:
- prefix separator:
Most letters have distinct enclosed, initial, final, and isolated forms: enclosed for a letter with a letter at both sides, initial for the first letter in a word that is outside of a sentence, final for the last letter in a word that is outside of a sentence, and isolated for referencing a single letter or a one-letter word. (A notable exception to that rule is .) Note that and have alternative final forms. A table of all forms follows.
Table of letter forms
|Enclosed Form||Initial Form||Final Form||Isolated Form|
The stemline (the central line) should be at the baseline of the glyph. The portions of each letter above the stemline should occupy the height of an ascender in Latin text, and the portions below the same.
Letters that have portions that are following the curves of the previous letter should ligate. (An example of this is , where the lower right line of the glyph would, optimally, form a single line with the upper left portion of the glyph.) However, ligation is not mandatory. The word (meaning God) receives a special ligature, , with identical metrics to other letters.
Glyphs can be of either of two types: stemless or stemmed. The recommended form is usually stemmed; however, in some uses (like headlines), a stemless glyph is recommended. The space glyph should either be a line or a blank glyph, depending on the style of the typeface.