Someone on the High-Logic forums is asking how to create ligatures for Cyrillic. This can be done easily enough, though it is not automated yet. In FontCreator one can generate the common Alphabetic Presentation forms as composites of existing glyphs. Many less common Latin ligatures like ct, ck, it, ip, fb, etc., can also be generated.
How common are ligatures in Cyrillic Typography and which letter pairs or triplets are found in existing fonts.
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Cyrillic ligatures are not terribly common, except, of course, when you make swashes and/or cursive and have to connect letters or, more commonly, tone down a wild swash of some .alt. Or you have special forms for the end of the word, like an /a with a long tail. So it's translates mostly to "how can I make a ligature between two .alts or an .alt and a letter that will work in most cases". This is a coding question, outside of this special case, I can momentarily think of no everyday examples.
Hrant, Вязъ is a liturgical style and already developed enough in a small family of fonts you can look up. Discussing it is like discussing the problems of Carolingian minuscule or the project for Medieval ligatures - broad but niche.
https://wordhelp.ru/contains/%D0%B4%D0%B4
In Russian (I am not a Russian) such words are either of foreign origin (Buddha, luddite) or such that a prefix ending in -д is followed by another morpheme starting with д-. Mashing the two together contradicts this basic principle and would actually slow down reading as the brain tries to figure it out. It would be like removing the periodcentered from Catalan. A disservice.
I do not know much about Cyrillic. For this reason, I asked Sergiy Tkachenko from 4th February Foundry in Ukraine, to add Cyrillics to a font of mine—when I had a request for this. The ligatures he added for Cyrillic, may be helpful for this discussion.
He added only these three ligatures:
uni0457_uni0457
uni0407_uni0407
quoteright_uni0457
He added this OpenType feature code for these ligatures:
sub uni0457 uni0457 by uni0457_uni0457;
sub uni0407 uni0407 by uni0407_uni0407;
sub quoteright uni0457 by quoteright_uni0457;
sub quotesingle uni0457 by quoteright_uni0457;
For one thing it looks like a ceiling panel hitting a guy. :-)
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An upright д_д ligature seems as weird to me as a d_d ligature. But I could be wrong.
André
There had been some occasional attempts at introducing stylistic ligatures into Russian typography, e.g. ий and нн. This one ⬇︎ dated 1928–1929, was proposed by Nikolay Piskarev:
The three-tittle Ukrainian ї+ї is there too.