What's with ligatures.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by WillAdams

The combined forms æ and œ are diphthongs, not ligatures and should only be used when linguistically appropriate.

The Wiki article on typographic ligatures disagrees with you:

Æ comes from Medieval Latin, where it was an optional ligature in some words, for example, "Æneas". It is still found as a variant in English and French, but the trend has recently been towards printing the A and E separately.[5] Similarly, Œ and œ, while normally printed as ligatures in French, can be replaced by component letters if technical restrictions require it.

[WillAdams]

HarryT, Look up Bringhurst's _Elements of Typographic Style_ instead.

Here's a page which references that:

http://en.allexperts.com/e/0/Æ.htm

William

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by WillAdams

HarryT, Look up Bringhurst's _Elements of Typographic Style_ instead.

Here's a page which references that:

http://en.allexperts.com/e/0/Æ.htm

William

Forbidden access. However http://en.allexperts.com/e/l/li/liga...ypography).htm
agrees with the definition in wikipedia.

[frabjous]

Funny the link works for me (not forbidden), but the page encoding is set wrong, so the characters, including the ligatures/geaphemes/diphthongs or whatever they in fact are--are all garbled.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by frabjous

Funny the link works for me (not forbidden), but the page encoding is set wrong, so the characters, including the ligatures/geaphemes/diphthongs or whatever they in fact are--are all garbled.

However http://en.allexperts.com/e/l/li/liga...ypography).htm
agrees with the definition in wikipedia.

Dale

[DaleDe]

This is an important topic. Unfortunately the original poster to https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=74990 mixed the problem of curley quotes with ligatures. I have separated this into two threads so that the separate discussions can continue.

Dale

[charleski]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

Forbidden access. However http://en.allexperts.com/e/l/li/liga...ypography).htm
agrees with the definition in wikipedia.

I can see the page too. Here's the relevant passage (you need to set your browser encoding to utf-8 frabjous):

Æ is a grapheme formed from the letters a and e. Originally a ligature representing a Latin diphthong, it has been promoted to the full status of a letter in the alphabets of many languages.
...
In English, usage of the ligature varies in different places. In modern typography, and where technological limitations prevent (such as in use of computers and typewriters), æ is often eschewed for the digraph ae. This is often considered incorrect

So there you are, if you trust whoever wrote that, it's actually a grapheme . Actually, since that section is just lifted from Wikipedia, the page's history shows that the definition as a grapheme was inserted by OwenBlacker, FWIW, so we're relying on the opinions of a software development manager with a degree in molecular biology.

I think the real distinction is that ligatures are set for purely stylistic reasons, to avoid ugly shapes caused by character collisions. Æ and œ, on the other hand, have a well-defined history as characters that are distinct from their constituent letters. They are both (in English anyway) well on the way to being discarded just as the Old English þ became th in the 14th century.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by charleski

I can see the page too. Here's the relevant passage (you need to set your browser encoding to utf-8 frabjous):
So there you are, if you trust whoever wrote that, it's actually a grapheme . Actually, since that section is just lifted from Wikipedia, the page's history shows that the definition as a grapheme was inserted by OwenBlacker, FWIW, so we're relying on the opinions of a software development manager with a degree in molecular biology.

I think the real distinction is that ligatures are set for purely stylistic reasons, to avoid ugly shapes caused by character collisions. Æ and œ, on the other hand, have a well-defined history as characters that are distinct from their constituent letters. They are both (in English anyway) well on the way to being discarded just as the Old English þ became th in the 14th century.

I would like it if that were the distinction but other references confirm that a ligature is any two characters combined into one without regard to the purpose. They are all graphemes as well as are all the letters and figures and other graphic entities like punctuation. Whether they are part of the alphabet depends on the language as are letters with accent marks. Some are and some are not. Try looking in a dictionary.

Dale

[charleski]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

I would like it if that were the distinction but other references confirm that a ligature is any two characters combined into one without regard to the purpose. They are all graphemes as well as are all the letters and figures and other graphic entities like punctuation. Whether they are part of the alphabet depends on the language as are letters with accent marks. Some are and some are not. Try looking in a dictionary.

Dale

Maybe I was being too subtle with the reference to OwenBlacker...

The ligatures that we're talking about in this thread (ff, fi, fj, etc) are glyph substitutions that are made purely for stylistic reasons. Bringhurst calls these 'typographic ligatures'.

OTOH, the ae in 'encyclopædia' [doh, now the character shows in ISO-8859-1 but not in utf-8] is completely different to the ae in 'metaethics' and Bringhurst terms this a 'lexical ligature'. In the first case you may choose to use the ligated form, you may choose to use separate characters, or you may simply drop the 'a' altogether, depending on the lexical style you wish to adopt. In the second case the only correct usage is to set the two characters separately.

[DaleDe]

Thank you, they are both ligatures by you own quote. Just different kinds. I know that we were talking about stylistic ligatures until Harry brought up the other kind and he didn't know about stylistic ligatures at all so I was explaining the difference. However, then the discussion said that only stylistic ligatures are ligatures and that is wrong as by your quote there are lexical ligatures. I am fine with that distinction. It was only stylistic ligatures that I meant when I said they should not be used in a source file.

Dale

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

Thank you, they are both ligatures by you own quote. Just different kinds. I know that we were talking about stylistic ligatures until Harry brought up the other kind and he didn't know about stylistic ligatures at all so I was explaining the difference.

Oh, I knew about them; what I hadn't appreciated was that there was a distinction made between the two "kinds" of ligature. I now do understand that difference so, for me at least, this has been a very useful thread!

[Jellby]

Ligatures sometimes get an entity as a separate letter or symbol. Things like "ñ", "w", "ß", "&" began as simple ligatures (typographic ligatures, I'd say), but are now mostly considered letters on their own.

[frabjous]

A lot of the time, I wish I didn't even know about the existence of ligatures.

At least with the fi/fl/ffl/ffi/ff ligatures, most of my life, I didn't even notice they were there when they were there, and didn't notice when they were gone. It's only when I started investigating why it is I found LaTeX output subtly better than MS Word output without really realizing why that I learned about such things.

Now of course, I'm cursed to noticing both their presence and their absence, and both are little distracting. Good typography of course is invisible typography, and normally it would be--I've basically made by own book reading experience worse by picking at it.

Generally, however, I think the inclusion of ligatures looks nice, but there is one exception: I've noticed that a lot of "Pro" fonts like Adobe Garamond Pro and Minion Pro, etc., have "Th" ligatures, which for some reason, just seem over the top to me.

[Valloric]

Originally Posted by frabjous

It's only when I started investigating why it is I found LaTeX output subtly better than MS Word output without really realizing why that I learned about such things.

"Subtly better"? That goes in my "euphemism of the week" box.

[frabjous]

LOL. All I mean is that, at least at first, I found it difficult to articulate in words what was so better looking about it...