The “ti” ligature

Tofu Type Foundry
Tofu Type Foundry Posts: 84
in Lettering Technique & Theory

I noticed in a recent video of Canadian prime minister Mark Carney that his pulpit featured a “ti” ligature (in a sans serif, nonetheless!). In general, “fi” ligatures seem to be given special treatment in Latin fonts, even receiving their own Unicode points and general inclusion with many fonts. Is the reason that this is not extended to the “ti” ligature because of historical metal type constraints? i.e. many text faces cast in metal would have had issues with the spacing of “fi” but not “ti”, so this ligature wouldn’t be needed?


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Comments

  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,756
    This is what I consider a stylistic ligature rather than a functional one. It doesn’t affect spacing, and is really just a mimicking of handwriting behaviour in which a crossbar naturally connects to the top of a following downstroke.
    receiving their own Unicode points
    The presentation form encodings for ligatures in Unicode only exist for round-trip backwards compatibility with pre-existing 8-bit codepages. They’re obsolete and best ignored.

  • michele casanova
    michele casanova Posts: 85
    In the fourteenth century "ti" was a ligature regularly used in calligraphy.

    In the 16th century it was used by Aldo Manuzio (italic), but I believe it quickly fell into disuse thereafter. I had only found the "tt" ligature for subsequent centuries.




  • Tofu Type Foundry
    Tofu Type Foundry Posts: 84
    The presentation form encodings for ligatures in Unicode only exist for round-trip backwards compatibility with pre-existing 8-bit codepages. They’re obsolete and best ignored
    @John Hudson I’ve always wondered why they exist in the first place!

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