just as the luft font had established itself as my favourite ereading font, version 33.x of the Iosevka font introduced an angled “top-cut” single storey lower case a in three glyph variants—serifless, serifed and tailed, leading into its introduction with the laft font.

The angled top-cut glyph is significantly more distinguishable than the standard serifless single storey a, at least to these eyes—due, i suspect, to the asymmetry of the glyph’s vertical bar—with its more distinct angled outline (perceptible even at small font sizes) contrasting what would otherwise be two competing symmetrical glyph shapes with the o character.

The “tailed” flair adds further distinction from the o glyph, as well as, offering a pleasant visual “flow”—noticeably to the grammatic article “a”.

from lift & luft

while past fonts have been previously biased towards serifless glyph shapes, the laft font relaxes this constraint with the tailed single storey a, reintroducing common monospaced source code (and past font) glyph shapes (while still adhering to non-mirrored glyph shapes for improved dyslexic readability). In particular..

• the rounded lower case m—being more visually complimentary with the rounded emphasis of the single storey a
• the tailed lower case d—similarly replicating the visual flow of the single storey a
• the toothless corner lower case b—departing from the toothless rounded glyph towards the more common toothed outline (sans corner)
• the serifed lower case j—like the i, the serif similarly distinguishing the “dot”
• the eared serifless lower case p—a return to its classic shape (all while still preserving non-mirrored b d p q outlines)..

The distinctive glyph set of the lift, luft and laft fonts..

letter	lift font	luft font	laft font
I (eye)	serifed	serifless	serifless
J	serifless	flat-hook	flat-hook
a	double-storey toothless-corner	double-storey toothless-corner	single-storey top-cut-tailed
b	toothless-rounded	toothless-rounded	toothless-corner
d	toothed	toothed	tailed
f	extended	extended	extended
l (el)	extended	extended	extended
j	flat-hook serifless	flat-hook serifless	flat-hook-serifed
m	earless single-arch	earless single-arch	earless-rounded double-arch
p	earless-corner	earless-corner	eared
q	hook-tailed	hook-tailed	hook-tailed
t	asymmetric (reversed)	asymmetric (reversed)	asymmetric (reversed)
u	toothless-rounded	toothless-rounded	toothless-rounded
y	straight	straight	straight-turn

readability

On 300 PPI eink screens, even at small font sizes, this top-cut font is highly legible—much more so than previous font sets with the serifless single storey a. The double storey luft and lift fonts still remain more legible but the added air the single storey a imparts to the page—with its third most common letter frequency and with the frequent “ea” bigram—is a refreshing reading alternative.

typeface	rank	readability aid	readability penalty	visual air
lift	1	double-storey a, serifed I (eye)
luft	2	double-storey a	serifless I (eye)
laft	3	serifed j	single-storey a, serifless I (eye)	increased

My current KOReader layout setup displaces the luft font with the new laft font for its decreased visual page density (increased air) as my default font—the luxury of good visual acuity (knock on wood!). As always, YMMV :-)

repos

This font may be found on OneDrive.