Even when the celators were well-versed in Latin, the letters may not have taken their modern form as uniformly as we know them today. Add to this the difficult task of engraving lettering into metal and it's actually rather surprising that we can often read these letters at all!
The main deviations seem to occur on letters which are made up of roughly parallel strokes such as N, V and A. These often become disjointed so that A's resemble H's and V's open up to look like two I's. The R's can often be indistinguishable from A's. All lettering tends to blend into the background as worn dies cracked or wore down making the legend nearly impossible to tell apart even when the coin itself is in relatively good shape. Almost without exception you should expect to have some difficulty in making out the complete legend or even part of it. With experience, the idiosyncrasies of the engraving style will become more familiar until it's fairly easy to tell at a glance what it says.
General lettering rules that apply to all Roman coins:
All letters will always be capitalized There are no U's in ancient latin, V is used both as a vowel and a consonant depending on context. There are no J's. As above, I's are used instead. G's almost always look like C's, typically with oversized serifs. There is usually no spacing in between words or titles. Where words/titles are broken up it is usually because of the design and not meant to facilitate the reading. In fact, the words will often be separated in non-sensical places. In the course of over 500 years, the font, or style, of the lettering remained remarkably consistent throughout. Indeed, the typical font of a newspaper nowadays is called "Times Roman" in acknowledgement of this timeless style. The lettering of this font is serifed, that is, the letters have little ornamental hooks at their ends. The I, for example, looks like a rotated H instead of a stick. The opposite of this font, called sans-serif is more modern and is used most frequently in advertising. Writing in the exergue may include Greek letters and unusual symbols. Mintmark lettering can also be found in the fields, especially in late Roman coinage, and most often take the form of single letters or symbols. Very late in the Roman era, coins coming from the eastern mints will have letters that look increasingly bizarre. This is due to an increasing influence of Greek. V's will resemble U's or Y's, letters will be reversed, familiar phrases will look oddly mispelled and so on.
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