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

  • 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!
  • Nick Shinn
    Nick Shinn Posts: 2,392
    Note also the rt “ligature” in the photo.
    I usually put a positive kern there.

  • Kent Lew
    Kent Lew Posts: 1,052
    Big Caslon Italic features a “ti” ligature. It is one of several alternates that Matthew Carter included, borrowing freely from the tradition of the English writing masters. There were so many that we grouped them into different stylistic sets — primarily “crossbar” ligatures {ss10} and “cursive” ligatures {ss11}.

    Part of the fun of this project was working out with Matthew the hierarchy & logic of contextual interactions between all the different options.

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