A collective term for roman and italic typefaces, distinguished from blackletter by their lighter, more open letterforms.
Definition
Whiteletter is a collective term for roman and italic typefaces — the letterforms that evolved from Renaissance humanist scripts and now constitute the standard typographic repertoire of the Latin alphabet. The term exists in contrast to blackletter: where blackletter scripts create a dense, dark texture on the page through compressed, angular strokes, whiteletter forms are wider, rounder, and more open, admitting more white space both within and between characters. The transition from blackletter to whiteletter in European printing occurred gradually from the late fifteenth century onward, driven by the humanist rediscovery of Carolingian minuscule.
Source
No access — Robert Bringhurst — p. 347:
Roman and italic letterforms, as distinct from blackletter.