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I never learned about ligatures in school, and have only recently been introduced to the idea of them. A couple weeks ago a buddy was putting together a logo in

I never learned about ligatures in school, and have only recently been introduced to the idea of them. A couple weeks ago a buddy was putting together a logo in photoshop and the 'fi' ran together. I had never seen that before, and opted to keep them separate, because I felt it would be confusing (or distracting) for people. I had no idea it was the correct way of typesetting (though I still think it would be confusing). As an aside, I learned Latex doing my thesis (though never noticed the ligatures), and fell in love. I recently wrote a patent application in it, but my attorney had never heard of it, so I (unfortunately) had to put it in Word for her to collaborate. Much less elegant.

kilian 17y ago
I had the same with the person editing my thesis. Ended up exporting it to RTF, saving it as .doc in openoffice, and copying all changed back into latex by hand.
Silhouette 17y ago
Unfortunately, a significant number of font designers and typesetters have tried to be a bit too clever with "proper" typography in recent years, as OpenType fonts and tools like LaTeX or InDesign have made it realistic to add professional quality typographic touches in everyday DTP projects. One common example is feeling that you "must" include certain ligatures in a font. There is absolutely no reason to mandate this if the glyph shapes do not require it, e.g., if setting the normal shape "f" then "i" with their natural spacing does not cause an awkward overlap. Equally, if glyph combinations other than the classic f-ligatures cause awkward clashes then corresponding ligatures should be provided. So, if you saw a font where the "fi" ligature ran together in a confusing way, it was almost certainly a poorly designed font (or a feature of a well designed font, used poorly). Another common idiocy in OpenType fonts is creating dedicated petite caps (the same height as lowercase letters) and then calling them small caps. The point of small caps is just to reduce the "heavy" appearance of a string of capitals, to avoid disrupting the flow for the reader. Small caps are not supposed to be so small that they are the same height as lowercase letters, because then small caps like O, S and C become near-enough indistinguishable from their lowercase counterparts, and if you have to do things like pluralise an acronym, things get messy. See also: "hanging" punctuation that puts the entire mark in the margin (the point is to give a visually, rather than mathematically, even margin, and hanging a few mm of glyph out there hardly does so), hanging bullets/list markers right out in the margin (these are supposed to cause a visual break in the flow, that's why they're there!), using oldstyle figures where they aren't necessary (OSF can be useful for avoiding chunkiness in the same way as small caps, but suffer similar problems to petite caps where an old-style 0 or 1 can easily be misread if the context doesn't make it clear which is intended), and so on. Unfortunately, there's a whole new breed of typographical snob who once read a book of rules about how typography "should" be done, and now apply those rules unthinkingly, resulting in documents that are neither more beautiful nor more functional that they would have been without the "clever" typography.

kilian 17y ago

I had the same with the person editing my thesis. Ended up exporting it to RTF, saving it as .doc in openoffice, and copying all changed back into latex by hand.

Silhouette 17y ago

Unfortunately, a significant number of font designers and typesetters have tried to be a bit too clever with "proper" typography in recent years, as OpenType fonts and tools like LaTeX or InDesign have made it realistic to add professional quality typographic touches in everyday DTP projects. One common example is feeling that you "must" include certain ligatures in a font. There is absolutely no reason to mandate this if the glyph shapes do not require it, e.g., if setting the normal shape "f" then "i" with their natural spacing does not cause an awkward overlap. Equally, if glyph combinations other than the classic f-ligatures cause awkward clashes then corresponding ligatures should be provided. So, if you saw a font where the "fi" ligature ran together in a confusing way, it was almost certainly a poorly designed font (or a feature of a well designed font, used poorly). Another common idiocy in OpenType fonts is creating dedicated petite caps (the same height as lowercase letters) and then calling them small caps. The point of small caps is just to reduce the "heavy" appearance of a string of capitals, to avoid disrupting the flow for the reader. Small caps are not supposed to be so small that they are the same height as lowercase letters, because then small caps like O, S and C become near-enough indistinguishable from their lowercase counterparts, and if you have to do things like pluralise an acronym, things get messy. See also: "hanging" punctuation that puts the entire mark in the margin (the point is to give a visually, rather than mathematically, even margin, and hanging a few mm of glyph out there hardly does so), hanging bullets/list markers right out in the margin (these are supposed to cause a visual break in the flow, that's why they're there!), using oldstyle figures where they aren't necessary (OSF can be useful for avoiding chunkiness in the same way as small caps, but suffer similar problems to petite caps where an old-style 0 or 1 can easily be misread if the context doesn't make it clear which is intended), and so on. Unfortunately, there's a whole new breed of typographical snob who once read a book of rules about how typography "should" be done, and now apply those rules unthinkingly, resulting in documents that are neither more beautiful nor more functional that they would have been without the "clever" typography.