Ligatures

- [Instructor] Something else you're going to come across…in the world of typography are ligatures.…Simply put, a ligature refers to two…or sometimes more characters replaced…by a specially designed single character.…The actual characters are still there,…it's just that they are optically replaced…by the ligature.…If you copy, pasted them into a basic text program…or something like an HTML Editor, for example,…the original characters would be…what you'd actually see there.…

The ligatures are a visual replacement…in desktop publishing software.…Ligatures are created primarily to improve the look…of characters that may appear to collide…or their proximity looks awkward.…If we look at the line of text here,…you can perhaps see that with their normal spacing,…the capital T and the lowercase H…don't look comfortable together at all.…The F for fine and the last of the double Fs in spiffing…are only narrowly avoiding those tittles.…

That's the name of that little dot…over the lowercase Is and Js.…The F and the L in flower are bumping their ascenders…