Comments on: Five simple steps to better typography – Part 3

By: Five Steps to Better Typography with Mark Boulton | Colin Harman

Five Steps to Better Typography with Mark Boulton | Colin Harman — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 04:48:29 +0000

[...] Part 3: Ligatures [...]

By: Ligatures « Life through Design

Ligatures « Life through Design — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 22:46:56 +0000

[...] / Five simple steps to better typography – 3 by Mark Boulton / Blog [...]

By: Ligatures on the Web « Adam D. Scott

Ligatures on the Web « Adam D. Scott — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 09:32:54 +0000

[...] Five Simples Steps to Better Typography: Ligatures [...]

By: Joe Clark

Joe Clark — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 06:20:12 +0000

I?m wondering when we?ll read one of your type postings that is actually error-free.

You can use f-ligatures in HTML. You also don?t even need character entities; I?m sure you are familiar with Unicode.

Once again, ?, ?, and the like are not ligatures but digraphs, and eth, thorn, and estset are neither of those things. (Tell me: Which two characters are combined to make each of those? Do you think s+s=??)

There?s already an f-ligature test file available if you wish.

By: Stephen

Stephen — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 05:55:43 +0000

Remember that the ampersand (&) is a ligature of the letters in et, the latin word for and. If you use the logogram in HTML you should always use the character reference: &

This explains why some rather old-fashioned people, myself included, use “&c.” instead of “etc.” to denote et cetera.

In all other cases the ampersand shouldn’t be used in body text. It should be used in company names, however.

By: Nic Johnson

Nic Johnson — Fri, 20 May 2005 06:07:09 +0000

The OpenType support by most Adobe programs these days is wonderful! (i.e. Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign)

To use them is as simple as turning on a switch in the character/type palette. For example, in the new Illustrator CS2, the Character palette is partnered with a little known palette named “OpenType.” There, you can change all the settings available for a given OpenType font including, but not limited to, ligatures, expanded ligatures, swashes, and small caps.

You can get yourself up to speed by checking out Adobe’s OpenType reference material.

By the way, thank you Mark for such a blessed ray of hope on the dreary landscape that is the web.

By: David

David — Thu, 12 May 2005 00:55:37 +0000

Check out Font Support for Unicode Block ‘Alphabetic Presentation Forms’.

By: Mark Boulton

Mark Boulton — Tue, 10 May 2005 05:07:51 +0000

dru - Thanks. I’ve been thinking of getting this stuff together and offering it as a pdf or something initially. Sounds like a good idea… ;-)

By: dru

dru — Wed, 04 May 2005 14:06:16 +0000

Love the articles. This is a depth in typography that I have not seen and find very refreshing. It would be cool if you defined all of these terms and had them availble as a seperate resource/book.

By: Tommy Olsson

Tommy Olsson — Mon, 02 May 2005 19:12:31 +0000

XHTML has nothing to do with it, although some old browsers may have problems with hexadecimal character references. So instead of ﬀ you could use the decimal notation: ﬀ.

The other points in Emery Snyder’s comment are valid, though.

By: Allan White

Allan White — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 04:21:40 +0000

Heyyy… you’ve been busy on your blog! Very cool stuff here, that appears to have sprung up overnight!

Yeah, my degree is just in Design (in general). Typography is a personal interest, but it certainly wasn’t my major focus of study.