Illustrated above are the five Latin ligatures. Some fonts offer more extensive ligature families.
The reason for ligatures is that the terminal on the lowercase f tends to run into the letters which follow it, so type designers created elegant solutions to the problem. In the digital age, with so many non-professionals setting type, these eyesores have reappeared.
Professional design programs offer automated substitutions of ligatures and many roman fonts offer, at the least, these five ligatures.
July 18, 2007 at 1:58 pm
Ok, oh wise one….you tell me. Who names the fonts? The resident fonts in our character generator for television work has names different than that in Microsoft Word. Eh? What gives? Sure, you’ll find Cooper being the same. But, have you heard of Fritz Quadrata? You are correct sir, this is a pretty limited audience. Should have called it Word Nerd. ha!
July 20, 2007 at 9:45 pm
Some fonts are protected by copyright (e.g. Helvetica) and when another foundry creates another version of that font, it is sold under an alias (e.g. Bitstream’s Swiss, which is their version of Helvetica).
There may indeed be such a thing as Fritz Quadrata, which would be the Acme Enterprises take on Friz Quadrata, which was created by Ernst Friz in 1965.
The eponymous Cooper, which was ubiquitous in the 1970s was designed in 1926 and is, likely, no longer copyrighted, so there is no need for an alias.