Rare discretionary ligatures

Ermin Međedović
Ermin Međedović Posts: 89
in Type Design Technique & Theory
ccedila_t, scommaaccent_t, scedilla_t...
I found some of this rare discretionary ligs on my old files and now
I'm wondering are those combinations ever used?

Which do you consider relevant / useful / needed?
T_h, s_t, c_t, s_p,...?

Comments

  • Chris Lozos
    Chris Lozos Posts: 1,460
    The T_h may be useful to fit the crossbar of T better with vertical of H. s_t and c_t are from old traditional ligatures and are not needed but historically used.
  • Jan Willem Wennekes
    Jan Willem Wennekes Posts: 148
    I've been looking for a list like yours for a while but never managed to find one. What I did last time I was looking for these was to check out a list of typefaces that have a lot of ligatures and try to decide whether those ligatures fit in your typeface or not.

    I've seen c_t f_t s_t and s_p been listed the most, but it really depends on the typeface I think.
    With another typeface I did discretionary ligatures such as f_j f_t T_h c_h c_k c_y c_p but also s_r s_l s_k s_b and c_a

    I'm interested to see what others would add here!
  • Michael Vokits
    Michael Vokits Posts: 214
    I wonder if they use T_h Tcl/Tk documentation when writing in Tlingit in Tbilisi... snarking aside, if I do/ T_h, I also do /T_b, etc. just in case.

    There are about ten thousand ligatures involving /f -- you never know if Kafka wants to say that he was the first official halfback, often halfheartedly flinging fjords offline; you need to work with all possibilities of [f]f[bhijkl] if you want to be thorough. Oh, and /longs in place of /f. And /longs with /f. And /florin. And /t.underdot... etc. Now I use a non-kerning form instead.

    Contextual alternates and care with serifs can really reduce the workload -- it's much better to have a /t.long and /f.long (/t or /f with a long extender) to automatically ligate into various following glyphs ("nifty nutty taffy," anyone?), than to create ten thousand repetitive ligatures. This approach also works with character tracking (I think that's the right term -- where you tell your app to add or subtract space from all sidebearings), unlike pre-made ligature glyphs.

    Then there are ligatures which are fun, historical, or purely decorative. I'll often work with various combinations of [cs][hklt] and whatnot. I don't think I've ever gotten systematic, but maybe I should.

    In short, non-kerning forms and contextual alternates make combinations with /f easy, allowing you to work with fun ligs.
  • Nick Shinn
    Nick Shinn Posts: 2,289
    T_h is silly, it’s an Adobe thing.
    The quaints are nice in quaint typefaces.

  • Michael Vokits
    Michael Vokits Posts: 214
    @Nick Shinn:

    Pithy and correct, as always. I always put /T_h (if I use it at all) into dlig for that reason.

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