An ink trap is a deliberate cutout or cavity carved into the interior corners of a letterform, specifically engineered to gather surplus ink at the intersections of stroke lines. Without these voids, wet ink would naturally pool or bleed outward during the high-speed printing process, leading to blurry edges and an unintentional thickening of the characters.
As printing machinery has advanced and reading has largely migrated to digital screens, the inclusion of these notches in contemporary typefaces has transitioned into a stylistic or aesthetic choice rather than a functional necessity. Even so, purposeful ink traps are still utilized today in fonts engineered for micro-typography, such as body text optimized for minimal scales, or within specialized font variations like the slanted cursive characters found in Gonzaga.
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