Zapfino is a calligraphic

Calligraphy

Calligraphy is a type of visual art. It is often called the art of fancy lettering . A contemporary definition of calligraphic practice is "the art of giving form to signs in an expressive, harmonious and skillful manner"...

 typeface

Typeface

In typography, a typeface is the artistic representation or interpretation of characters; it is the way the type looks. Each type is designed and there are thousands of different typefaces in existence, with new ones being developed constantly....

 designed for Linotype by typeface

Typeface

In typography, a typeface is the artistic representation or interpretation of characters; it is the way the type looks. Each type is designed and there are thousands of different typefaces in existence, with new ones being developed constantly....

 designer Hermann Zapf

Hermann Zapf

Hermann Zapf is a German typeface designer who lives in Darmstadt, Germany. He is married to calligrapher and typeface designer Gudrun Zapf von Hesse....

 in 1998. It is based on an alphabet Zapf originally penned in 1944. As a font

Font

In typography, a font is traditionally defined as a quantity of sorts composing a complete character set of a single size and style of a particular typeface...

, it makes extensive use of ligatures

Ligature (typography)

In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes are joined as a single glyph. Ligatures usually replace consecutive characters sharing common components and are part of a more general class of glyphs called "contextual forms", where the specific shape of a letter depends on...

 and character variations (for example, the lower case letter d has nine variations).
In 1983, Zapf had completed the typeface AMS Euler

AMS Euler

AMS Euler is an upright cursive typeface, commissioned by the American Mathematical Society and designed and created by Hermann Zapf with the assistance of Donald Knuth. It tries to emulate a mathematician's style of handwriting mathematical entities on a blackboard, which is upright rather than...

with Donald Knuth

Donald Knuth

Donald Ervin Knuth is a computer scientist and Professor Emeritus at Stanford University.He is the author of the seminal multi-volume work The Art of Computer Programming. Knuth has been called the "father" of the analysis of algorithms...

 and David Siegel of Stanford University

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

 for the American Mathematical Society

American Mathematical Society

The American Mathematical Society is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, which it does with various publications and conferences as well as annual monetary awards and prizes to mathematicians.The society is one of the...

, a typeface for mathematical composition including fraktur and Greek

Greek alphabet

The Greek alphabet is the script that has been used to write the Greek language since at least 730 BC . The alphabet in its classical and modern form consists of 24 letters ordered in sequence from alpha to omega...

 letters.