03 May TYPOGRAPHIC LIGATURES: ONLY A QUESTION OF STYLE?
MAYBE YOU HAVE NEVER HEARD ABOUT TYPOGRAPHIC LIGATURES, BUT BE ASSURED THAT YOU HAVE READ THEM A LOT OF TIMES WITHOUT NOTICING!
WHAT IS A LIGATURE?
In typography, a ligature occurs where two or more letters are joined to form a glyph.
You can find them especially (but not limited to) in texts written in lowercase; there are different types of ligatures and reading them is so frequent that we do not notice their presence.
They are useful mainly for the two following reasons:
- They improve text appearance
- They make reading more fluent by avoiding the superposition of two letters and simply joining them. The commonest examples are fi, ff, tt, and ti.
These we have just described are stylistic ligatures.
There are other types of ligatures. Linguistic ligatures are the graphic representation of a phoneme, such as ß for the sound of double s (ss), or of diphthongs like æ (a) or œ (o).
Today, using stylistic ligatures is a question of choice. When designing a book or a publication, you have to decide since the beginning whether to use ligatures or not so that to define all subsequent processing steps accordingly.
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