Ligature in font design

author ： Suziyue

Or call it “ Why? PDF Some of the copied words will disappear ”, “ Why are some Fonts “fi” It can be connected ”, “Fira Code How to achieve the conjoined symbol ”

ligature

ligature, The Chinese page of Wikipedia is called “ List of words spelled with ”, In fact, the concept is closer to “ Hyphenation ”. Just as literally , Ligatures are words that are connected together , For example, Chinese ligatures are like this ：

It is said that , Seeing words is like seeing people . Some experts, according to the signature of the president , It is said that his wildness is just as uninhibited as his arrogance ……

In the Latin family , Ligatures are often used .  For example, the letters of German ß At first it was ss, ="en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T"> In the Latin alphabet W The beginning was VV, Two V…, It's amazing . And in the phonetic symbols we are familiar with æ This letter , It looks like a ligature , But it's not a ligature , æ It is a really useful letter in a series of languages such as old English .

fi And print

When movable type printing was popular , People use typefaces to print articles . An article , If you want to use different Fonts , Then choose the corresponding different font .

Some fonts are used as Letter f and Letter i When connected together , f A cross of the will follow i A little bump into , Result in poor typesetting . So for the convenience of 、 beautiful , Some fonts directly have fi Ligature type . Whether it's a ligature of a printed font , Or the ligature with handwritten font on it , Are the same concept , All call ligature.

In the computer font ligature

Although computer fonts will not have all the physical limitations of printed Fonts , But some Fonts fi Still retained ligature This characteristic of . If you look in your computer font configuration page , You can find the relevant properties .

The setting of hyphenation can also be supported on the computer , So smart people think they can use it to make things ！ For example, there is a font called Fira Code.

https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode

Fira Code  Claim to be the most suitable programming language for programmers , Because it is extremely friendly to all kinds of mathematical symbols （ Please click the following figure for details ）

Of course, the premise is that the editor should also support ligature, Such as JetBrains system IDE:

As the ancient wisdom said ：

Get new , Day by day , New again

I still need to learn one more .

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