Typography 101 – Ligatures

Ligatures seem to be a dying art. You will find huge numbers of graphic designers that give you a funny, questioning look if you mention them in casual typographic conversation. As with all the subjects I cover in typography however, understanding and using ligatures can add that little extra sophistication to your design.

Ligatures are pairs or combinations of characters that are set as a single character within a typeface. “Why?” you might ask. Well, sometimes, more often, but not limited to, older serif faces certain characters can have elements which will naturally interfere with parts of the next character in a word. The most prevalent example would be the characters ‘f’ and ‘i’ when set in lower case. The over-hanging tip of the ‘f’ will naturally touch or overlap the dot on the ‘i’. The overlapping of these character pairs are referred to as ‘kerns’

You could get round this by manually kerning the letters but you may find that this creates a precedent of a certain amount of space which means you have to kern the rest of the word so that the spacing appears even again. The other option is to use an ‘fi’ ligature. This ligature is the letter pair of ‘f’ and ‘i’ created by the designer of the font specifically for this purpose.

Common ligatures include character sequences that are seen most often in the latin alphabet which cause kerns such as; ‘fi’, ‘fl’, ‘ffl’ and ‘ff’.

Not all typefaces contain all or any ligatures however, so the avid typographer will get a little excited by a font that does. These will often be one of the established, classic typefaces and a few of the most reputable contemporary font vendors will endeavor to be this thorough when designing their fonts and faces. Many software packages can replace character pairs for the corresponding ligatures automatically as you type. You will have to explore the relevant settings to find out how.

It is worthwhile noting that ligatures can be used in dynamic text rendering like HTML by using ‘unicode’ references or HTML entities. As I have already mentioned though, all typefaces do not contain ligatures, so I do not use them in this instance… Just to be sure. Any text that is to be rendered as an image however is fair game.

The example above shows some kerns occurring and also the ligatures which not only relieve the visual tension of the overlaps, but demonstrate the aesthetic quality of the shapes themselves.

As a final note the correct name for any character in a typeface, be that a roman letter, ligature, number or a punctuation mark is called a ‘glyph’.