History

At the agent of typographical ligatures is the simple active calm of belletrist in manuscripts. Already the ancient accepted script, Sumerian cuneiform, includes abounding cases of appearance combinations that over the script's history gradually advance from a band into an absolute appearance in its own right. Ligatures amount noticeably in abounding actual scripts, conspicuously the Brahmic abugidas, or the bind rune of the Migration Period Germanic bewitched inscriptions.

Doubles (Geminated consonants) during the Roman Republican era were accounting as a sicilicus,1 during the mediaeval era several conventions existed, mostly characteristic marks, but in Nordic texts a accurate blazon of band appeared for ll and tt, referred to as torn l and torn t2

Medieval scribes, autograph in Latin, added autograph acceleration by accumulation characters and by addition of accounting abbreviation. For example, in blackletter, belletrist with right-facing bowls (b, o, and p) and those with left-facing bowls (c, e, o, d, g and q) were accounting with the adverse edges of the bowls superimposed. In abounding Software forms characters such as h, m, and n had their vertical acclamation superimposed. Scribes aswell acclimated accounting abbreviations to abstain accepting to address a accomplished appearance at a stroke. Manuscripts in the fourteenth aeon active hundreds of such abbreviations.

Simple archetype of broadly acclimated ligatures typed by autography typographic font.

In duke writing, a band is fabricated by abutting two or added characters in a way they wouldn't usually be, either by amalgamation their parts, autograph one aloft addition or one central another; while in printing, a band is a accumulation of characters that is typeset as a unit, and the characters don't accept to be abutting — for example, in some cases fi band prints belletrist f and i added afar than if they are typeset as abstracted letters.

When press with adaptable blazon was invented about 1450,3 typefaces included abounding ligatures and added letters, such as the letter Гѕ (thorn) which was aboriginal commissioned in English with y (e.g. ye olde shoppe), but after accounting as th. However, they began to abatement out of use with the appearance of the advanced use of sans serif machine-set physique argument in the 1950s and the development of bargain phototypesetting machines in the 1970s, which did not crave artisan ability or training to operate. Using ligatures fabricated press with adaptable blazon easier, because one block would alter common combinations of letters, that would contrarily crave two to three blocks. One of the aboriginal computer book programs to yield advantage of computer-driven book (and after laser printers) was the TeX affairs of Donald Knuth (see beneath for added on this). The trend was added adequate by the desktop publishing anarchy about 1985. Aboriginal computer software in accurate (except for TeX) had no way to acquiesce for band barter (the automated use of ligatures area appropriate), and in any case a lot of new agenda fonts did not cover any ligatures. As a lot of of the aboriginal PC development was advised for and in the English language, which already saw ligatures as alternative at best, a charge for ligatures was not seen. Band use fell as the amount of employed, traditionally-trained duke compositors and hot metal book apparatus operators dropped.

With the added abutment for added languages and alphabets in avant-garde computing, and the consistent bigger agenda book techniques such as OpenType, ligatures are boring advancing aback into use.