Quote:
Originally Posted by hobnail
It is its own character, but only on output when displayed or printed.
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Not necessarily.
In Unicode itself, there are a handful of ligature characters, but these were provided mostly for backwards compatibility. Characters like: ff, fi, fl, ffi.
And in the rare case, ligatures are actual letters in the alphabet. Like æ in Danish/Norwegian. For more details on this, see
"Æ" on Wikipedia +
"Orthographic ligature" > Letters and diacritics originating as ligatures.
OpenType
In OpenType, there are 4 main categories:
- Standard ligatures
- Contextual ligatures
- Discretionary ligatures
- Historical ligatures
Beyond that, ligatures can also be arbitrary combinations of letters. Like in these code-focused fonts with: +- -> ±.
The underlying characters are all still there: fi, st, fl... the font itself will just display these combinations differently or add flourishes depending on the settings (and font size!).
Side Note: For more specific details, see
Microsoft's article, "OpenType Font Features" > Ligatures.
Quote:
Originally Posted by j.p.s
It is still my opinion that ligatures are worse than useless.
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They serve a purpose for readability. It's why often you see 'f' in ligatures, because the 'f' overhangs to the upper right, so it often causes unsightly visual gaps or clashes with other tall letters.
Side Note: For a lot more details/reading, see my
Post #18 in "Turn off ligatures (temporarily)?" (and the rest of the thread) + especially see the talk I referenced in Post #29,
"Selective Ligature Suppression" given at TUG 2018. In that talk, he goes to extreme detail about ligatures and how various languages handle them (plus many strange edge cases, like Turkish with the f + ı [dotless i]).