In the United States, an artistic style cannot be copyrighted, and neither can a typeface "as such"—yet the font file sitting in your operating system may be a fully protected computer program. This article resolves that paradox by tracing it back to copyright's core architecture: the idea-expression dichotomy of 17 U.S.C. 102(b), the deep suspicion the law reserves for useful articles, and the merger and scenes a faire doctrines that keep the alphabet in the commons. It explains why the Copyright Office and the courts have refused typeface registration for half a century (37 C.F.R. 202.1(e); Eltra Corp. v. Ringer), and why scalable font software nonetheless earns protection as authored code (Adobe Systems v. Southern Software). It then maps the toolkit designers actually use—design patents under 35 U.S.C. 171, trademark for names, and enforceable license agreements—and closes with worked hypotheticals, frontier questions on web fonts and AI-generated type, a practitioner FAQ, and cross-references to the wider UpLaw copyright and design-patent library.