Talk:Counter (typography)

Still confused
Aren't (lower-case) "e" and (upper-case) "A" examples of letters with both open and closed counters ? There's an open and an enclosed area to each of them. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.71.206.174 (talk) 17:37, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

Aperture confusion
In my book 'Fonts and Encodings', O'Reilly 2007. Pg. 4:

The counter, which is the inner part of a letter, for example, the space inside an 'o' and 'O', a 'D', etc. The counter of an 'e' is commonly called an eye. When the letter is open at one end, as is the case with 'n' we speak instead of an aperture.

Velle (talk) 23:45, 28 November 2010 (UTC)


 * How curved does the relevant part of a glyph have to be in order to be considered an aperature? Certainly, 'c' makes sense because it is like only a minorly broken-open 'o', and it also makes sense that the pipe | would not be considered to have an aperture, but what about the parenthesis ( ?
 * Arlo James Barnes 06:23, 24 May 2014 (UTC)

Lower case ‘k’
If the different versions of lower case ‘g’ are mentioned, then why not the lower case ‘k’ variant with a loop which is similar to a capital ‘R’. It is certainly available in the Italic version of several fonts. Is there a particular reason this has not been included? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.24.61.183 (talk) 09:51, 21 July 2019 (UTC)

Define "Open"
How can I tell whether a character has an open counter or not? Does the letter X have 4 open counters? Or do counters have to be at least partially rounded? Does a lowercase w have counters or not? Does the letter L have one large open counter? 1.126.108.171 (talk) 05:24, 15 May 2022 (UTC)