Formal scripts[edit]

A majority of formal scripts are based upon the letterforms of seventeenth and eighteenth century
writing-masters like George Bickham, George Shelley and George Snell. The letters in their original
form are generated by a quill or metal nib of a pen. Both are able to create fine and thick strokes.
Typefaces based upon their style of writing appear late in the eighteenth century and early
nineteenth century. Contemporary revivals of formal script faces can be seen in Kuenstler
Script and Matthew Carter's typeface Snell Roundhand. These typefaces are frequently used for
invitations and diplomas to effect an elevated and elegant feeling. They may use typographic
ligatures to have letters connect.

Casual scripts[edit]
Casual scripts show a less formal, more active hand. The strokes may vary in width but often appear
to have been created by wet brush rather than a pen nib. They appeared in the early twentieth
century, and with the advent of photocomposition in the early 1950s, their number rapidly increased.
They were popularly used in advertising in Europe and North America into the 1970s. Examples of
casual script types include Brush Script, Kaufmann and Mistral. Some may be non-connecting
like Freestyle Script.

Technology[edit]

Claude Garamond's famous grecs du roi typeface, intended to mimic the handwriting of Cretan scribe Angelo
Vergecio. To mimic his writing, many alternate characters are needed. While this style was once very popular
in printing the Greek alphabet, it is no longer used due to its complexity.

Script typefaces place particular demands on printing technology if the letters are intended to join up
and vary like handwriting. A typeface intended to mimic handwriting, such as Claude
Garamond's grecs du roi typeface, will require many alternate characters. In digital type these (once
drawn) can be substituted seamlessly through contextual ligature insertion in applications like
InDesign, but this was complicated in metal. Another complexity in metal type was that sorts had to
have delicate overhanging parts to interlock. This required careful design and casting for the sorts to
fit together without gaps or the sorts breaking, or leaving gaps to be filled in by the natural spread of
ink on paper.[4][5]
Script typefaces have evolved rapidly in the second half of the 20th century due to developments in
technology and the end of widespread use of metal type. Historically, most signwriting on logos,
displays and shop frontages did not use fonts but was rather custom-designed lettering created by
signpainters and engravers.[6][7][8][9] As phototypesetting and then computers have made printing text at
a range of sizes far easier than in the metal type period, it has become increasingly common for
businesses to use type for logos and signs rather than hand-drawn lettering. In addition,
phototypesetting made overlap of characters relatively simple, something very complicated to
achieve in metal type. Matthew Carter has cited his 1966 Snell Roundhand typeface as deliberately
designed to replicate a style of calligraphy hard to simulate in metal.[10][11] An additional development
enabling more sophisticated script fonts has been the release of the OpenType format, which most
fonts are now released in. This allows fonts to have a large character set, increasing the
sophistication of design possible, and contextual insertion, in which characters that match one
another are inserted into a document automatically, so fonts can convincingly mimic handwriting
without the user having to choose the correct substitute characters manually. [12] Many modern script
typefaces emulate the styles of hand-drawn lettering from different historical periods.

Unicode[edit]
Further information: Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols
In Unicode there is a script Latin alphabet for mathematical use, with both capital and small letters.
Few fonts provide support for all 52 characters, and their presentations vary in style
from roundhand to chancery hand and others.
These characters are: 𝒜ℬ𝒞𝒟ℰℱ𝒢ℋℐ𝒥𝒦ℒℳ𝒩𝒪𝒫𝒬ℛ𝒮𝒯𝒰𝒱𝒲𝒳𝒴𝒵
𝒶𝒷𝒸𝒹ℯ𝒻ℊ𝒽𝒾𝒿𝓀𝓁𝓂𝓃ℴ𝓅𝓆𝓇𝓈𝓉𝓊𝓋𝓌𝓍𝓎𝓏

 Some characters are named "SCRIPT ..." in Unicode:

U+2113 ℓ SCRIPT SMALL L (HTML  ℓ  ·  ℓ )
U+2118 ℘ SCRIPT CAPITAL P (HTML  ℘  ·  ℘, ℘ ) (actually a misnomer,
name is corrected into WEIERSTRASS ELLIPTIC FUNCTION)