version 33.x of the Iosevka font introduces an angled “top-cut” single storey lower case a in three glyph variants—serifless, serifed and tailed. The laft font introduces the tailed top-cut single storey a to the luft font.

The angled top-cut glyph is significantly more distinguishable than the standard serifless single storey a, at least to these eyes—i suspect it is due to the asymmetry of the glyph’s vertical bar, breaking the visual comparison of what would otherwise be two competing symmetrical glyph shapes a and o.

The “tail” adds to the legibility of the glyph, as well as, offering a pleasant visual “flow”, especially to the singular “a”. Several other glyph differences from the luft font are reintroduced as a cascading result whilst still maintaining the non-mirrored glyph shape emphasis of the font..

• the rounded lower case m—being more visually complimentary with the rounded emphasis of the single storey a
• the tailed lower case d—further replicating the visual flow of the single storey a
• the toothless corner serifless lower case b
• the eared serifless lower case p.

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		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.