Quote:
Originally Posted by Man Eating Duck
OK. The most common meaning is that of a stylistic ligature. This is a font effect where some character combinations like "fi", "ffi" and so on are replaced with a single glyph that's more 'æsthetically pleasing' (personally I'm not a fan). This of course requires that your font actually contains that glyph. Some examples can be seen here:
Another meaning is linguistic 'letters' that are composed of two other letters, the Norwegian 'æ' was originally a ligature of 'a' and 'e'. It is now a distinct letter, however. dipus and Cæsar, for instance, can legitimately be spelled with ligatures if you are extremely pretentious. Did you see what I did above? 
When people speak of ligatures they are very likely referring to the typographic ones displayed in the image, and those relate to fonts and typography. I'm sure others can elaborate.
Edit: I might add that typographic ligatures originated in the old-school days of typography before computers, when all letters where actually metal types where each character had a fixed width regardless of the neighbouring characters. This made some character combinations stand out, as they had too much space between them, and typographers rectified this by creating distinct types for these character combinations. |
You must be really old
All the metal type I set in High School was variable (OK about 4 distinct) widths. Ligatures as shown above, tuck adjacent characters in under the previous. (saving space ?)