2. Ligatures

This is the second of a 10-part series of the Ten Keys to Seamless Typesetting.

There probably isn’t anything quite as explosive in polite conversation as saying that iPhone is better than Android (or vice versa). Perhaps talking about politics? Nah, the iPhone vs Android debate is still going strong.

In typesetting, the argument used to be PC versus Mac. Of course, the operating system is less important than the software and workflow. When I originally wrote this post, I used Windows for a particular Word feature. InDesign offers its core typography tools on both platforms, though fonts, scripts and automation still need checking for compatibility.

However, many years ago, before Adobe came out with InDesign and Quark ruled in the world of desktop publishing, the advantage of Mac over PC was the fact that Quark for Mac could insert ligatures (well the two in the image above) automatically.

The most classic example is the fi ligature. In the Arno example at the top of this page, the dot of the i comes close to the top of the f when the letters are set separately. A ligature gives the designer a way to resolve that collision. The need for such combinations depends on the typeface.

So what was the solution on the PC-version of Quark? There was no choice but to use the “expert set” of the typeface (mentioned in part one of this series). However, this was far from ideal because if the word had to be letter-spaced in order to achieve full justified text, then the spacing of the word containing the ligature would be unequal or you had to manually remove the ligature. Clearly not a good solution. However, even if you were on the Mac, you only had a solution for the fi and fl ligatures. There are of course many more combinations such as: Th, ff, fb, ffb, ffh, ffi, ffj, ffk, ffl, fft, fh, fi, fj, fk, fl, ft?

Honestly, I only worried about ff, ffi and ffl, and on the Mac still had to use expert sets, but it was very tedious.

In the image below, the first row shows separate letter combinations in Arno and the second shows their ligatures. Some solve collisions; others are stylistic choices. Not every typeface needs the same set.

Again, OpenType and suitable layout software make these substitutions much easier. The font must contain the relevant ligatures, and the application must support and enable the feature. In the example above, InDesign applied the ligatures automatically; I turned the feature off to produce the first line.

In the images below we see how the combination of InDesign, OpenType format typefaces and of course many hours of work of professional font designers, allow us to enjoy a full set of ligatures as you can see in the first line of the image below. If you look closely, you might notice that the first f of ff or ffi and ffl is shorter than the second f and the crossbars of the two fs join.

Typefaces such as Arno will often come with discretionary ligatures such as below. In the second line, we see alternates such as the ft and ct ligatures. Probably not going to be used much in setting modern-day texts, but if setting a poem or prose from a previous century, discretionary ligatures can add a touch of class.

And to repeat the sign-off from the previous post in the series of Ten Keys to Seamless Typesetting – note how this blog post was written with no support for ligatures.

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If you have a manuscript that you wish to be typeset seamlessly using a full set of ligatures, then contact us for a no-obligation discussion by clicking here.

Looking forward to your comments below!​