Ligatures

- [Voiceover] In this chapter, we are going to look at…Open Type features, beginning in this movie with ligatures.…Ligatures being two or more characters…that are fused into a single character…to avoid the appearance of a character collision.…So they're purely aesthetic.…Let's just take a look at this first column…where the ligatures are turned off…and you can see that we have an…unfortunate character collision with the lowercase f and i,…and the lowercase f and l.…

To turn on ligatures,…I'll just put my cursor into this text frame.…Press command a,…come up to my control panel menu…and we just need to make sure that…this option here is checked.…To incorporate ligatures into a paragraph style,…you'll find the option in your basic character formats.…This check box.…Now while ligatures are almost always a good idea…when working with serif type.…When you work with sans serif type,…the problem of the character collision…may not exist in the first place…so there is no need for ligatures…and what's more, using ligatures can just look rather odd.…