In typesetting and page layout, alignment or range is the setting of text flow or image placement

relative to a page, column (measure), table cell, or tab. The type alignment setting is sometimes
referred to as text alignment, text justification, or type justification. The edge of a page or
column is known as a margin, and a gap between columns is known as a gutter.

Basic variations[edit]
There are four basic typographic alignments:

flush leftthe text is aligned along the left margin or gutter, also known as left-aligned, ragged
right or ranged left;
flush rightthe text is aligned along the right margin or gutter, also known as right-
aligned, ragged left or ranged right;
justifiedtext is aligned along the left margin, and letter- and word-spacing is adjusted so that
the text falls flush with both margins, also known as fully justified or full justification;
centeredtext is aligned to neither the left nor right margin; there is an even gap on each side
of each line.
Note that alignment does not change the direction in which text is read; however text direction may
determine the most commonly used alignment for that script.

Flush left[edit]
In English and most European languages where words are read left-to-right, text is usually aligned
"flush left",[1] meaning that the text of a paragraph is aligned on the left-hand side with the right-hand
side ragged. This is the default style of text alignment on the World Wide Web for left-to-right
text. [2] Quotations are often indented.
Flush left might also be used in very narrow columns, where full justification would produce too much
whitespace between characters or words on some lines.

Flush right[edit]
In other languages that read text right-to-left, such as Arabic and Hebrew, text is commonly aligned
"flush right". Additionally, flush-right alignment is used to set off special text in English, such as
attributions to authors of quotes printed in books and magazines, or text associated with an image to
its right. Flush right is often used when formatting tables of data.

Justified[edit]
A common type of text alignment in print media is "justification", where the spaces between words,
and, to a lesser extent, between glyphs or letters, are stretched or compressed to align both the left
and right ends of each line of text. When using justification, it is customary to treat the last line of
a paragraph separately by simply left or right aligning it, depending on the language direction. Lines
in which the spaces have been stretched beyond their normal width are called loose lines, while
those whose spaces have been compressed are called tight lines.
Some modern typesetting programs offer four justification options: left justify, right justify, center
justify and full justify. These variants respectively specify whether the full lines of a paragraph are
aligned on the left or the right, centered (edges not aligned), or fully justified (spread over the whole
column width). In programs that do not offer multiple kinds of justification, typically only left (for left-
to-right languages) or right (for right-to-left languages) justification is provided.

Centered[edit]
Centered text

Text can also be "centered", or symmetrically aligned along an axis in the middle of a column. This is
often used for the title of a work, headlines, and for poems and songs. As with flush-right alignment,
centered text is often used to present data in tables. Centered text is considered less readable for a
body of text made up of multiple lines because the ragged starting edges make it difficult for the
reader to track from one line to the next.
Centered text can also be commonly found on signs, flyers, and similar documents where grabbing
the attention of the reader is the main focus, or visual appearance is important and the overall
amount of centered text is small.

Examples[edit]
The following table displays the difference between a justified (flush left and flush right) and a flush
left (and ragged right) text.

Justified (flush left and right) Flush left, ragged right

Thy father was delighted and cried out to the
servant, Give him a hundred and three gold
pieces with a robe of honour! The man obeyed
his orders, and I awaited an auspicious moment,
when I blooded him; and he did not baulk me;
nay he thanked me and I was also thanked and
praised by all present. When the blood-letting
was over I had no power to keep silence and
asked him, By God, O my lord, what made thee
say to the servant, Give him an hundred and
three dinars?; and he answered, One dinar was
for the astrological observation, another for thy
pleasant conversation, the third for the
phlebotomisation, and the remaining hundred
and the dress were for thy verses in my
commendation. May God show small mercy
to my father, exclaimed I, for knowing the like
of thee.[3]
Thy father was delighted and cried out to the
servant, Give him a hundred and three gold
pieces with a robe of honour! The man obeyed
his orders, and I awaited an auspicious moment,
when I blooded him; and he did not baulk me;
nay he thanked me and I was also thanked and
praised by all present. When the blood-letting
was over I had no power to keep silence and
asked him, By God, O my lord, what made thee
say to the servant, Give him an hundred and
three dinars?; and he answered, One dinar was
for the astrological observation, another for thy
pleasant conversation, the third for the
phlebotomisation, and the remaining hundred
and the dress were for thy verses in my
commendation. May God show small mercy
to my father, exclaimed I, for knowing the like
of thee.[3]
It was common for early word processing systems to use monospaced fonts, and packages
designed for these systems often allowed text to be justified by inserting extra spaces between
words in the shorter lines. This has the disadvantage that it tends to lead to very uneven spaces
between words.
The following is an example of justified text in a monospaced font, one in which each character,
including the whitespace character, occupies the same amount of horizontal space:

And indeed thou shalt never find a man better versed in affairs
than I, and I am here standing on my feet to serve thee. I am not
vexed with thee: why shouldest thou be vexed with me? But
whatever happen I will bear patiently with thee in memory of the
much kindness thy father shewed me." "By God," cried I, "O thou
with tongue long as the tail of a jackass, thou persistest in
pestering me with thy prate and thou becomest more longsome in
thy long speeches, when all I want of thee is to shave my head
and wend thy way!"

Problems with justification[edit]

Automated justification in a demonstration from the early 1990s. The technology was later purchased by Adobe
and added to their InDesign product.

Justification sometimes leads to typographic anomalies. One example: when justification is used in
narrow columns, extremely large spaces may appear between words on lines with only two or three
words.
Another example: when the spaces between words line up approximately above one another in
several loose lines, a distracting river of white space may appear.[4] Rivers appear in right-aligned,
left-aligned and centered settings too, but are more likely to appear in justified text, because of the
additional word spacing. Since there is no added white space built into a typical full stop (period),
other than that above the full stop itself, full stops only marginally contribute to the river effect
At one time, common word-processing software adjusted only the spacing between words, which
was a source of the river problem. Modern word processing packages and professional publishing
software significantly reduce the river effect by adjusting also the spacing between characters.
Additionally, these systems use advanced digital typography techniques such as automatically
choosing among different glyphs for the same character and slightly stretching or shrinking the
character in order to better fill the line. The technique of glyph scaling or microtypography has been
implemented by Adobe InDesign and more recent versions of pdfTeX.
The problem of loose lines is reduced by using hyphenation. With older typesetting systems
and WYSIWYG word processors, this was done manually: the compositor or author added
hyphenation on a case-by-case basis. Currently, most typesetting systems (also called layout
programs) and modern word processors hyphenate automatically, using a hyphenation algorithm. In
addition, professional typesetting programs almost always provide for the use of an exception
dictionary, in part because no algorithm hyphenates all words correctly, and in part because different
publishers will follow different dictionaries. Different publishers may also have different rules about
permissible hyphenation. Most publishers follow a basic system such as the Chicago Manual of
Style or Oxford style, but will overlay their own "house style," which further restricts permissible
hyphenation.
Word-processing software usually use a different kind of justification when dealing with Arabic texts.
Using kashida, characters or glyphs are elongated instead of stretching the white spaces. Another
technique sometimes used is word heaping.
Justification has been the preferred setting of type in many Western languages through the history of
movable type. This is due to the classic Western manuscript book page being built of a column or
two columns, which is considered to look "best" if it is even-margined on the left and right. The
classical Western column did not rigorously justify, but came as close as feasible when the skill of
the penman and the character of the manuscript permitted. Historically, both scribal and typesetting
traditions took advantage of abbreviations (sigla), ligatures, and swash to help maintain the rhythm
and colour of a justified line.
Its use has only waned somewhat since the early 20th century through the advocacy of the
typographer Jan Tschichold's book Asymmetric Typography and the freer typographic treatment of
the Bauhaus, Dada, and Russian constructivist movements.
Not all "flush left" settings in traditional typography were identical. In flush left text, words are
separated on a line by the default word space built into the font.
Continuous casting typesetting systems such as the Linotype were able to reduce the jaggedness of
the right-hand sides of adjacent lines of flush left composition by inserting self-adjusting space bands
between words to evenly distribute white space, taking excessive space that would have occurred at
the end of the line and redistributing it between words. This feature is also available in desktop
publishing systems, although most now default to more sophisticated approaches.
Graphic designers and typesetters using desktop systems also have the option, though rarely used,
to adjust word and letter spacing, or "tracking", on a manual line-by-line basis to achieve more even
overall spacing. Some modern desktop publishing programs, such as Adobe InDesign, evaluate the
effects of all the different possible line-break choices on the entire paragraph, to choose the one that
creates the least variance from the ideal spacing while justifying the lines (so as to reduce rivers);
this also gives the least uneven edge when set with a ragged margin.

Swash (typography)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Swashes marked with red color

Minion Pro in capital letters in regular (1), italic (2) and swash (3) style

A swash is a typographical flourish, such as an exaggerated serif, terminal, tail, entry stroke, etc., on
a glyph.[1] The use of swash characters dates back to at least the 16th century, as they can be seen
in Ludovico Vicentino degli Arrighi's La Operina, which is dated 1522. As with italic type in general,
they were inspired by the conventions of period handwriting.[2] Arrighi's designs influenced designers
in Italy and particularly in France

Typefaces with swashes[edit]

Most typefaces with swashes are serif fonts, among which (if present) they are often found solely in
italics. Advanced digital fonts often supply two italic designs: one with swashes and a more
restrained standard italic.
Among old-style typefaces, some releases of Caslon, such as Adobe Caslon, and Garamond,
including Adobe Garamond Pro and EB Garamond, have swash designs.[4][5] Old-style typefaces
which include swashes but do not follow a specific historical model include Minion by Robert
Slimbach and Nexus by Martin Majoor.[6][7]
Among transitional typefaces, Baskerville's original design has swashes on J, N, Q and T. Some
revivals remove these, while others may add more. Mrs. Eaves has a particularly large number.[8]
Didone fonts with swashes include Surveyor and ITC Bodoni.[9][10]
Helvetica Flair, a redesign of the sans-serif font Helvetica with swashes

Sans-serif fonts with swashes are much rarer. Classiq by Yamaoka Yasuhiro, based on Garamond,
contains swash italic designs, as do Goudy's Sans Serif Light Italic and Mr Eaves, a sans-serif
derivative of Mrs Eaves.[11] Helvetica Flair, a redesign of Helvetica with swashes by Phil Martin, is
considered a hallmark of 1970s design, and has never been issued digitally. It is considered to be a
highly conflicted design, as Helvetica is seen as a spare and rational typeface and swashes are
ostentatious: font designer Mark Simonson described it as "almost sacrilegious". Martin would later
recall being accused of "typographic incest" by one German writer for creating it.[12][13]

Flamboyant swashes in the Zapfinotypeface

As swashes are based on period handwriting, script typefaces with swashes are common, and
include Zapf Chancery and Zapfino, both by Hermann Zapf.
Some historical revivals add optional swashes to designs that did not originally have them to
produce a more varied design. For example, Adobe Garamond Pro's swash design is based not on
the printing of Claude Garamond himself but on designs by his younger contemporary Robert
Granjon.[14] The original Caslon italic had swashes only on the letters JQTY; others have been added
since by revivals of his designs.

Scribal abbreviations or sigla (singular: siglum or sigil) are the abbreviations used by ancient and
medieval scribes writing in Latin, and later in Greek and Old Norse. Modern manuscript editing
(substantive and mechanical) employs sigla as symbols indicating the location of a source
manuscript and to identify the copyist(s) of a work. Abbreviated writing, using sigla, arose partly
from the limitations of the workable nature of the materials (stone, metal, parchment etc.) employed
in record-making and partly from their availability. Thus, lapidaries, engravers and copyists made the
most of the available writing space. Scribal abbreviations were infrequent when writing materials
were plentiful, but by the 3rd and 4th centuries AD, writing materials were scarce and costly.
During the Roman Republic, several abbreviations, known as sigla (plural of siglum =
symbol/abbreviation), were in common use in inscriptions, and they increased in number during
the Roman Empire. Additionally, in this period shorthand entered general usage. The earliest known
Western shorthand system was that employed by the Greek historian Xenophon in the memoir of
Socrates, and it was called notae socratae. In the late Roman Republic, the Tironian notes were
developed possibly by Marcus Tullius Tiro, Cicero's amanuensis, in 63 BC to record information with
fewer symbols; Tironian notes include a shorthand/syllabic alphabet notation different from the Latin
minuscule hand and square and rustic capital letters. The notation was akin to
modern stenographic writing systems. It used symbols for whole words or word roots and
grammatical modifier marks, and it could be used to write either whole passages in shorthand or
only certain words. In medieval times, the symbols to represent words were widely used; and the
initial symbols, as few as 140 according to some sources, were increased to 14,000 by
the Carolingians, who used them in conjunction with other abbreviations. However, the alphabet
notation had a "murky existence" (C. Burnett), as it was often associated with witchcraft and magic,
and it was eventually forgotten. Interest in it was rekindled by the Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas
Beckett in the 12th century and later in the 15th century, when it was rediscovered by Johannes
Trithemius, abbot of the Benedictine abbey of Sponheim, in a psalm written entirely in Tironian
shorthand and a Ciceronian lexicon, which was discovered in a Benedictine monastery (notae
benenses).[1]
To learn the Tironian note system, scribes required formal schooling in some 4,000 symbols; by the
Classical period (c. 7th century BC to 5th century AD)[citation needed], the number increased to some 5,000
symbols and then to some 13,000 in the medieval period (4th to 15th centuries AD);[2] the meanings
of some characters remain uncertain. Sigla were mostly used in lapidary inscriptions; in some places
and historical periods (such as medieval Spain) scribal abbreviations were overused to the extent
that some are indecipherable.

Forms[edit]
The abbreviations were not constant but changed from region to region. Scribal abbreviations
increased in usage and reached their height in the Carolingian Renaissance (8th to 10th centuries).
The most common abbreviations, called notae communes, were used across most of Europe, but
others appeared in certain regions. In legal documents, legal abbreviations, called notae juris,
appear but also capricious abbreviations, which scribes manufactured ad hoc to avoid repeating
names and places in a given document.[3]
Scribal abbreviations can be found in epigraphy, sacred and legal manuscripts, written in Latin or in
a vernacular tongue (but less frequently and with fewer abbreviations), either calligraphically or not.
Latin abbreviations of praedicatorum, quoque, conversis, and quorum.

In epigraphy, common abbreviations were comprehended in two observed classes:

The abbreviation of a word to its initial letter;

The abbreviation of a word to its first consecutive letters or to several letters, spaced in the word.
Both forms of abbreviation are called "suspensions" (as the scribe suspends the writing of the word).
A separate form of abbreviation is by "contraction" and was mostly a Christian usage for sacred
words, Nomina Sacra; non-Christian sigla usage usually limited the number of letters the
abbreviation comprised and omitted no intermediate letter. One practice was rendering an overused,
formulaic phrase only as a siglum: DM for Dis Manibus ("Dedicated to the Manes"); IHS from the first
three letters of ""; and RIP for requiescat in pace ("Rest in Peace") because the long-form
written usage of the abbreviated phrase, by itself, was rare. According to Trabe, these abbreviations
are not really meant to lighten the burden of the scribe but rather to shroud in reverent obscurity the
holiest words of the Christian religion.[4]
Another practice was repeating the abbreviation's final consonant a given number of times to
indicate a group of as many persons: AVG denoted "Augustus", thus, AVGG denoted "Augusti duo";
however, lapidaries took typographic liberties with that rule, and instead of using COSS to denote
"Consulibus duobus", they invented the CCSS form. Still, when occasion required referring to three
or four persons, the complex doubling of the final consonant yielded to the simple plural siglum. To
that effect, a vinculum (overbar) above a letter or a letter-set also was so used, becoming a universal
medieval typographic usage. Likewise the tilde (~), an undulated, curved-end line, came into
standard late-medieval usage.
Besides the tilde and macron marks, above and below letters, modifying cross-bars and extended
strokes were employed as scribal abbreviation marks, mostly for prefixes and verb, noun and
adjective suffixes. The typographic abbreviations should not be confused with
the phrasal abbreviations: i.e. (id est "that is"); loc. cit. (loco citato "in the passage already
cited"); viz. (vide licet "namely", "that is to say", "in other words" formed with "vi" and the yogh-
like glyph [ ], [ ], the siglum for the suffix -et and the conjunction et) and et cetera.
Moreover, besides scribal abbreviations, ancient texts also contained variant typographic characters,
including ligatures (e.g. , , etc.), the long s (), and the half r, resembling an Arabic number two
("2"). The "u" and "v" characters originated as scribal variants for their respective letters, likewise the
"i" and "j" pair. Modern publishers printing Latin-language works replace variant typography and sigla
with full-form Latin spellings; the convention of using "u" and "i" for vowels and "v" and "j" for
consonants is a late typographic development.

Scribal sigla in modern use[edit]

Latin script[edit]
Some ancient and medieval sigla are still used in English and other European languages; the
Latin ampersand (&) replaces the conjunction and in English, et in Latin and French, and y in
Spanish (but its use in Spanish is frowned upon, since the y is already smaller and easier to write).
The Tironian sign , resembling the digit seven ("7"), represents the conjunction et and is written only
to the x-height; in current Irish language usage, the siglum denotes the conjunction agus ("and").
Other scribal abbreviations in modern typographic use are the percentage sign (%), from the
Italian per cento ("per hundred"); the permille sign (), from the Italian per mille ("per thousand");
the pound sign (, and #, all descending from or lb, librum) and the dollar sign ($), which derives
from the Spanish word Peso. The commercial at symbol (@), originally denoting "at the rate/price
of", is a ligature derived from the English preposition at; from the 1990s, its use outside commerce
became widespread, as part of e-mail addresses.
Typographically, the ampersand ("&"), representing the word et, is a space-saving ligature of the
letters "e" and "t", its component graphemes. Since the establishment of movable-type printing in the
15th century, founders have created many such ligatures for each set of record type (font) to
communicate much information with fewer symbols. Moreover, during the Renaissance (14th to 17th
centuries), when Ancient Greek language manuscripts introduced that tongue to Western Europe, its
scribal abbreviations were converted to ligatures in imitation of the Latin scribal writing to which
readers were accustomed. Later, in the 16th century, when the culture of publishing included
Europe's vernacular languages, Graeco-Roman scribal abbreviations disappeared, an ideologic
deletion ascribed to the anti-Latinist Protestant Reformation (15171648).
Church Slavonic[edit]

Sigla frequently used in contemporary Church Slavonic

After the invention of printing, manuscript copying abbreviations continued to be employed in Cuurch
Slavonic and are still in use in printed books as well as on icons and inscriptions. Many common
long roots and nouns describing sacred persons are abbreviated and written under the
special diacritic symbol titlo, as shown in the figure at the right. That corresponds to the Nomina
sacra (Latin: "Sacred names") tradition of using contractions for certain frequently-occurring names
in Greek ecclesiastical texts. However, sigla for personal nouns are restricted to "good" beings and
the same words, when referring to "bad" beings, are spelled out; for example, while "God" in the
sense of the one true God is abbreviated as "", "god" referring to "false" gods is spelled out.
Likewise, the word for "angel" is generally abbreviated as "", but the word for "angels" is
spelled out for "performed by evil angels" in Psalm 77.[5]

Abbreviation types[edit]
Adriano Cappelli's Lexicon Abbreviaturarum,[6] enumerates the various medieval brachigraphic signs
found in Latin and Italian vulgar texts, which originate from the Roman sigla, asymbol to express a
word, and Tironian notes. Quite rarely, abbreviations did not carry marks to indicate that an
abbreviation has occurred: if they did, they were often copying errors. For example, "e.g." is written
with dots, but modern terms, such as "PC", may be written in uppercase.
It should be noted that the original manuscripts were not written in a modern sans-serif or serif font
but in Roman capitals, rustic, uncial, insular, Carolingian or blackletter styles. For more, refer
to Western calligraphy or a beginner's guide.[7]
Additionally, the abbreviations employed varied across Europe. In Nordic texts, for instance,
two runes were used in text written in the Latin alphabet, which are for f "cattle, goods" and
for mar "man".
Cappelli divides abbreviations into six overlapping categories:

by suspension (troncamento)
by contraction (contrazione)
with independent meaning (con significato proprio)
with relative meaning (con significato relativo)
by superscript letters (per lettere sovrapposte)
by convention (segni convenzionali)
Suspension[edit]

Examples for suspension type

They are terms where only the first part is written, and the last part is substituted by a mark, which
can be of two types:
General
indicating there has been an abbreviation but not how. The marks are placed above or
across the ascender of the letters.

The final three of the series are knot-like and are used in papal or regal documents.
 Specific
indicating that a truncation has occurred.

The third case is a stylistic alternative found in several fonts, here Andron (Unicode chart
extended D).
The largest class of them is single letters standing for a word that starts with
that letter.
A dot at the baseline after a capital letter may stand for a title if it is used
such as in front of names or a person's name in medieval legal documents.
However, not all sigla use the beginning of the word.

Exceptions: sigla not using the first letter of the abbreviated word

For plural words, the siglum is often doubled: "F." = frater and "FF."
= fratres. Tripled sigla often stand for three: "DDD" = domini tres.
Letters lying on their sides, or mirrored (backwards), often indicate female
titles, but a mirrored C, , stands generally for con or contra (the latter
sometimes with a macron above, "").
To avoid confusion with abbreviations and numerals, the latter are often
written with a bar above. In some contexts, however, numbers with a line
above indicate that number is to be multiplied by a thousand, and several
other abbreviations also have a line above them, such as "" (Greek
letters chi+rho) = Christus or "IHS" = Jesus.
Starting in the 8th or the 9th century, single letter sigla grew less common
and were replaced by longer, less-ambiguous sigla, with bars above them.

Contraction[edit]
Abbreviations by contraction have one or more middle letters omitted. They
were often represented with a general mark of abbreviation (above), such
as a line above. They can be divided into two subtypes:
pure
a pure contraction keeps only the first (one or more) and last (one or more) letters but not
intermediate letters. Special cases arise when a contraction keeps only the first and last
letter of a word, resulting in a two-letter sigla.
mixed (impure)
a mixed contraction keeps one or more intermediate letters of the word that is abridged.

Marks with independent meaning[edit]

Examples of independent marks

Such marks inform the reader of the identity of the missing part of
the word without affecting (independent of) the meaning. Some of
them may be interpreted as alternative contextual glyphs of their
respective letters.

The straight or curved macron above a letter means that

an n or m is missing. A remnant can be seen in Spanish where
an n with a tilde () is used for []. In Visigoth texts before the
9th century, however, a dot is placed above the macron to
indicate m, and the same mark without a dot meant n. The line
with a dot became the general mark after the 9th century in
Visigoth texts.
A mark, resembling the Arabic numeral 9 or a mirrored C in
Gothic texts, is one of the oldest signs and can be found in the
texts of Marcus Valerius Probus and Tironian notes with the
same meaning as con.
Another mark, milar to a bold comma placed after the letter on
the median line, represented us or os, generally at the end of
the word, being the nominative case affix of the second
declension, sometimes is or simply s. The apostrophe used
today originated from various marks in sigla, which caused its
current use in elision, such as in the Saxon genitive.
A wave-like or omicron-like mark stands for a missing r (rhotic
consonant) or ra. Sometimes, a similar wave-like mark at the
end of a word indicated a missing -a or syllable ending in -a.
This is, however, a coincidence, as one of the marks stems
from a small r-like mark and the other from an a-like one. In
later texts, it became a diaeresis (two dots), or a broken line.
A mark, resembling the Arabic numeral 2 and placed on the
median line after the letter, indicates tur or ur, which occurs
generally at the end of the word. Alternatively it could stand
for ter or er but not at the end of the word. (Nordic languages,
such as Old English, have a lightning-bolt-like mark for words
ending in er.)
The r rotunda with a cut generally stood for -rum, but it could
also stand for a truncation after the letter r.
 A last mark, which could either be the Tironian note or
the ampersand &, was used with equal frequency as the
conjunction et (and) or as et in any part of the word. The
symbol at the end of a word indicates the enclitic -que (and).
A corruption occurs in some manuscripts between it and
the us/os mark.
Marks with relative meaning[edit]

Examples for relative marks

The meaning of the marks depends on the letter on which they

appear.
A macron not fully above the character but crossing the
descender or ascender:
b, b bre-, ber-, -ub
c (with a link on the right) cum, con, cen-
(above) quondam
d, d de-, der, -ud (a crossed d, not = eth)
h, h haec, hoc, her
vel, ul-, -el
m (above) mem-, mun-
n (above) non, nun-
(crossed horizontally, not Danish ) oblit
p per, par-, por-
p (above) prae, pre- (alternatively, a mark similar to -us comma above but with a small
spiral glyph could be used for this meaning, and it is also valid above the letter q)
pp (above) or pp (below) propter, papa
q qui and, in Italy, que, but in England quam, quia
q above quae
qq (above) or qq (below) quoque
q (tilde above and line below) quam
t ter-, tem-, ten-
, v (above) ven-, ver, -vit

A dot, two dots, comma and dot (different from a semicolon),

and the Arabic numeral 3-like mark were generally at the end
of a word on the baseline. After b, they mean -us (semicolon-
like and also could mean -et). After q, they form the
conjunction -que (meaning "and" but attached to the end of the
last word) with semicolon-like and the q could be omitted.
Semicolon-like, in Lombard documents, above s meant -sis.
The dot above median line on an h hoc. Dot above u
ut or uti. The could mean -est, or after a, e, u vowels meant -
 m not us or ei, if after an o it meant -nem. In certain papers the
mark can be confused with a cut rrotunda (handwritten 4-
like).
A dot to the left and right of a letter gave the following
meanings: e .e. est, i .i. id est, n .n. enim, q
.q. quasi, s .s. scilicet, t .t. tune, . . quondam,
.. etiam.
A diagonal line, often hooked, mark crossing nearly all the
letters gives a different meaning. Commonly a
missing er, ar, re. Variants of which were placed above and
were -like, tilde (crossing ascender) and similar to
the us mark. These, used in various combinations, allow for
various uses giving additional meanings.
2-like mark, after a q q quia. After 15th century alone
et (being similar to ) and alone with line above etiam.
After u and a at the end of a word (u , a ) m, after s
s , et or ed.
Stacked or superscript letters[edit]
A superscript letter generally referred to the letter omitted, but, in
some instances, as in the case of vowel letters, it could refer to a
missing vowel combined with the letter r, before or after it. One
should note that it is only in some English dialects that the
letter r before another consonant largely silent and the preceding
vowel is "r-coloured".
However, a, i,
and o above g meant g gna, g gni and g gno respectively. Although
in English, the g is silent in gn, but in other languages, it is
pronounced. Vowel letters above q meant qu + vowel: q, q, q, q, q.

a on r: r regula
o on m: m modo
Vowels were the most common superscripts, but consonants could
be placed above letters without ascenders; the most common
were c, e.g. n. A cut l above an n, n, meant nihil for instance.

Convention marks[edit]
These marks are nonalphabetic letters carrying a particular
meaning. Several of them continue in modern usage, as in the case
of monetary symbols. In Unicode, they are referred to as letter-like
glyphs. Additionally, several authors are of the view that the Roman
numerals themselves were, for example, nothing less than
abbreviations of the words for those numbers. Other examples of
symbols still in some use are alchemical and zodiac symbols,
which were, in any case, employed only in alchemy and astrology
texts, which made their appearance beyond that special context
rare.

Other[edit]
See also: Palaeography, Illuminated manuscript, Typographic
ligature, and Breviograph

In addition to the signs used to signify abbreviations, medieval

manuscripts feature some glyphs that are now uncommon but were
not sigla. Many more ligatures were used to reduce the space
occupied, a characteristic that is particularly prominent in
blackletter scripts. Some letter variants such as r rotunda, long
s and uncial or insular variants (Insular G), Claudian letters were in
common use, as well as letters derived from other scripts such as
Nordic runes: thorn (=th) and eth (=dh). An illuminated
manuscript would feature miniatures, decorated initials or littera
notabilior, which later resulted in the bicamerality of the script (case
distinction).

Typographic replication[edit]

Entries for Croydon and Cheam, Surrey, in Domesday Book (1086), as

published using record type in 1783.

Various typefaces have been designed to allow scribal

abbreviations and other archaic glyphs to be replicated in print.
They include "record type", which was first developed in the 1770s
to publish the Domesday Book and was fairly widely used for the
publication of medieval records in Britain until the end of the 19th
century.

Unicode encoding[edit]
Main article: Medieval Unicode Font Initiative

In the Unicode Standard v. 5.1 (4 April 2008), 152 medieval and

classical glyphs were given specific locations outside of the Private
Use Area. Specifically, they are located in the charts "Combining
Diacritical Marks Supplement" (26 characters), "Latin Extended
Additional" (10 characters), "Supplemental Punctuation" (15
characters), "Ancient Symbols" (12 characters) and
especially "Latin Extended-D" (89 characters).[8] These consist in
both precomposed characters and modifiers for other characters,
called combining diacritical marks (such as writing in LaTeX or
using overstrike in MS Word).
Characters are "the smallest components of written language that have semantic value" but glyphs
are "the shapes that characters can have when they are rendered or displayed".[9] The origin of
typographical ligatures comes from the invention of writing with a stylus on fibrous material (like
paper) or clay. Businessmen especially who needed a way to speed up the process of written
communication found that conjoining letters and abbreviating words for lay use was more convenient
for record keeping and transaction than the bulky long forms. The earliest known script, Sumerian
cuneiform, includes many cases of character combinations that, over time, gradually evolve from
ligatures into separately recognizable characters. Ligatures figure prominently in many historical
manuscripts, notably the Brahmic abugidas, or the bind rune of the Migration Period Germanic runic
inscriptions.

Doubles (Geminated consonants) during the Roman Republic era were written as a sicilicus.[2] During the
medieval era several conventions existed (mostly diacritic marks). However, in Nordic texts a particular type of
ligature appeared for ll and tt, referred to as "broken l" and "broken t"[3]

Medieval scribes who wrote in Latin increased their writing speed by combining characters and by
introducing notational abbreviations. Others conjoined letters for aesthetic purposes. For example,
in blackletter, letters with right-facing bowls (b, o, and p) and those with left-facing bowls
(c, e, o, d, g and q) were written with the facing edges of the bowls superimposed. In many script
forms, characters such as h, m, and n had their vertical strokes superimposed. Scribes also used
notational abbreviations to avoid having to write a whole character in one stroke. Manuscripts in the
fourteenth century employed hundreds of such abbreviations.
Modifications to script bodies like these usually originate from legal, business and monastic sources,
with the emphasis shifting from business to monastic sources by around the 9th and 10th centuries.

Simple example of widely used ligatures in a handwriting-style typeface.

In hand writing, a ligature is made by joining two or more characters in atypical fashion by merging
their parts or by writing one above or inside the other. While in printing, a ligature is a group of
characters that is typeset as a unit, and the characters do not have to be joined. For example, in
some cases the fi ligature prints the letters f and i with a greater separation than when they are
typeset as separate letters. When printing with movable type was invented around 1450,[4]typefaces
included many ligatures and additional letters, as they were based on handwriting. Ligatures made
printing with movable type easier because one block would replace frequent combinations of letters
and also allowed more complex and interesting character designs which would otherwise collide with
one another.
Ligatures began to fall out of use due to their complexity in the 20th century. Sans serif typefaces,
increasingly used for body text, generally avoid ligatures, though notable exceptions include Gill
Sans and Futura. Inexpensive phototypesetting machines in the 1970s (which did not
require journeyman knowledge or training to operate) also generally avoid them.
The trend was further strengthened by the desktop publishing revolution starting around 1977 with
the production of the Apple II. Early computer software in particular had no way to allow for ligature
substitution (the automatic use of ligatures where appropriate), while most new digital typefaces did
not include ligatures. As most of the early PC development was designed for the English language
(which already treated ligatures as optional at best) dependence on ligatures did not carry over to
digital. Ligature use fell as the number of traditional hand compositors and hot metal
typesetting machine operators dropped due to the mass production of the IBM Selectric brand of
electric typewriter in 1961. A designer active in the period commented: "some of the worlds greatest
typefaces were quickly becoming some of the worlds worst fonts."[5]
Ligatures have grown in popularity over the last 20 years due to an increasing interest in creating
typesetting systems that evoke arcane designs and classical scripts. One of the first computer
typesetting programs to take advantage of computer-driven typesetting (and later laser printers)
was Donald Knuth's TeX program. Now the standard method of mathematical typesetting, its default
fonts are explicitly based on nineteenth-century styles. Many new fonts feature extensive ligature
sets; these include FF Scala, Seria and others by Martin Majoor and Hoefler Text by Jonathan
Hoefler. Mrs Eaves by Zuzana Licko contains a particularly large set to allow designers to create
dramatic display text with a feel of antiquity. A parallel use of ligatures is seen in the creation of
script fonts that join letterforms to simulate handwriting effectively. This trend is caused in part by the
increased support for other languages and alphabets in modern computing, many of which use
ligatures somewhat extensively. This has caused the development of new digital typesetting
techniques such as OpenType, and the incorporation of ligature support into the text display systems
of OS X, Windows and applications like Microsoft Office. An increasing modern trend is to use a "Th"
ligature which reduces spacing between these letters to make it easier to read, a trait infrequent in
metal type.[6][7][8]
Today, modern font programming divides ligatures into three groups, which can be activated
separately: standard, contextual and historical. Standard ligatures are needed to allow the font to
display without errors such as character collision. Designers sometimes find contextual and historic
ligatures desirable for creating effects or to evoke an old-fashioned print look.

Latin alphabet[edit]
Stylistic ligatures[edit]

Many ligatures combine f with the following letter. A particularly prominent example is (or fi,
rendered with two normal letters). The tittle of the i in many typefaces collides with the hood of
the f when placed beside each other in a word, and are combined into a single glyph with
the tittle absorbed into the f. Other ligatures with the letter f include fj,[note 1] fl (), ff (), ffi (), and ff
l (). Ligatures for fa, fe, fo, fr, fs, ft, fb, fh, fu, fy, and for f followed by a full stop, comma,
or hyphen, as well as the equivalent set for the doubled ff and fft are also used, though are less
common.
These arose because with the usual type sort for lowercase f, the end of its hood is on a kern, which
would be damaged by collision with raised parts of the next letter.
Ligatures crossing the morpheme boundary of a composite word are sometimes considered
incorrect, especially in official German orthography as outlined in the Duden. An English example of
this would be ff in shelfful; a German example would be Schifffahrt ("boat trip").[note 2] Some computer
programs (such as TeX) provide a setting to disable ligatures for German, while some users have
also written macros to identify which ligatures to disable.[9][10]

Ligatures "Th" and "Wh" illustration

Turkish distinguishes dotted and dotless "I". In a ligature with f (in words such as frn ("oven")
and fikir ("idea")), this contrast would be obscured. The fi ligature is therefore not used in Turkish
typography, and neither are other ligatures like that for fl, which would be rare anyway.

"" in the form of a "" ligature on a street sign in Berlin (Petersburger Strae). The sign on the right
(Bersarinplatz) ends with a "t" ligature.

Remnants of the ligatures /z ("sharp s", esszett) and t/tz ("sharp t", tezett) from Fraktur, a family
of German blacklettertypefaces, originally mandatory in Fraktur but now employed only stylistically,
can be seen to this day on street signs for city squares whose name contains Platz or ends in -platz.
Instead, the "sz" ligature has merged into a single character, the German see below.

Sometimes, ligatures for st (), t (), ch, ct, Qu and Th are used (e.g. in the typeface Linux
Libertine).

German [edit]
Main article:
The German Eszett (also called the scharfes S, meaning sharp s) is an official letter of the
alphabet in Germany and Austria. There is no general consensus about its history. Its name Es-
zett (meaning S-Z) suggests a connection of "long s and z" () but the Latin script also knows a
ligature of "long s over round s" (s). The latter is used as the design principle for the character in
most of today's typefaces. Since German was mostly set in blackletter typefaces until the 1940s, and
those typefaces were rarely set in uppercase, a capital version of the Eszett never came into
common use, even though its creation has been discussed since the end of the 19th century.
Therefore, the common replacement in uppercase typesetting was originally SZ (Mae MASZE,
different from Masse MASSE) and later SS (Mae MASSE). The SS replacement is currently
the only valid spelling according to the official orthography (the so-called Rechtschreibreform) in
Germany and Austria. For German writing in Switzerland, the is omitted altogether in favour of ss.
Since 2008, the capital version () of the Eszett character is part of Unicode and appears in more
and more typefaces. The new character has not yet entered mainstream writing. A new standardized
German keyboard layout (DIN 2137-T2) has included the capital since 2012. Since the end of
2010, the Stndiger Ausschuss fr geographische Namen (StAGN) suggests the new upper case
character for "" rather than replacing it with "SS" or "SZ" for geographical names.[11]

Massachusett [edit]
In the colonial orthography created by John Eliot, later used in the first Bible printed in the Americas,
the Massachuset-language Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblum God published in 1663,
although Eliot had previously translated catechisms and published books of the Bible as well as
trained Indians to become literate who in turn trained others. A prominent feature of the new
orthography was his use of the double-o ligature "" to represent the "oo" of "food" as opposed to
the "oo" of "hook", although Eliot himself used "oo" and "" interchangeably. In the orthography in
use since 2000 in the Wampanoag communities participating in the Wopanaak Language
Reclamation Project, the ligature was replaced with the numeral 8, partly because of its ease in
typesetting and display as well as similarity to the o-u ligature used in Abenaki. For
example, seepash[12] (colonial) (seep8ash) (WLRP, modern).[13]

Letters and diacritics originating as ligatures[edit]

Further information: List of Latin letters

Capilla de San Jose, Sevilla. Several ligatures.

The ligatures of Adobe Caslon Pro.

As the letter W is an addition to the Latin alphabet that originated in the seventh century, the
phoneme it represents was formerly written in various ways. In Old English, the Runic letter wynn ()
was used, but Norman influence forced wynn out of use. By the 14th century, the "new" letter W,
originated as two Vs or Us joined together, developed into a legitimate letter with its own position in
the alphabet. Because of its relative youth compared to other letters of the alphabet, only a few
European languages (English, Dutch, German, Polish, Welsh, Maltese, and Walloon) use the letter
in native words.
The character (lower case ; in ancient times named sc) when used in the Danish, Norwegian,
or Icelandic languages, or Old English, is not a typographic ligature. It is a distinct lettera vowel
and when alphabetised, is given a different place in the alphabetic order. In modern English
orthography is not considered an independent letter but a spelling variant, for example:
"encyclopdia" versus "encyclopaedia" or "encyclopedia".
comes from Medival Latin, where it was an optional ligature in some words, for example,
"neas". It is still found as a variant in English and French, but the trend has recently been towards
printing the A and E separately.[14] Similarly, and , while normally printed as ligatures in French,
are replaced by component letters if technical restrictions require it.
In German orthography, the umlauted vowels , , and historically arose from ae, oe, ue ligatures
(strictly, from superscript e, viz. a, o, u). It is common practice to replace them with ae, oe,
ue digraphs when the diacritics are unavailable, for example in electronic conversation. Phone books
treat umlauted vowels as equivalent to the relevant digraph (so that a name Mller will appear at the
same place as if it were spelled Mueller; German surnames have a strongly fixed orthography, either
a name is spelled with or with ue); however, the alphabetic order used in other books treats them
as equivalent to the simple letters a, o and u. The convention in Scandinavian
languages and Finnish is different: there the umlaut vowels are treated as independent letters with
positions at the end of the alphabet.
The ring diacritic used in vowels such as likewise originated as an o-ligature.[15] Before the
replacement of the older "aa" with "" became a de facto practice, an "a" with another "a" on top (a)
could sometimes be used, for example in Johannes Bureus's, Runa: ABC-
Boken (1611).[16] The uo ligature in particular saw use in Early Modern High German, but it merged
in later Germanic languages with u (e.g. MHG fuosz, ENHG fu, Modern German Fu "foot"). It
survives in Czech, where it is called krouek.
The tilde diacritic, used in Spanish as part of the letter , representing the palatal nasal consonant,
and in Portuguese for nasalization of a vowel, originated in ligatures where n followed the base
letter: Espanna Espaa.[17] Similarly, the circumflex in French spelling stems from the ligature of a
silent s.[18] The French, Portuguese, Catalan and old Spanish letter represents a c over a z; the
diacritic's name cedilla means "little zed".
The letter hwair (), used only in transliteration of the Gothic language, resembles a hw ligature. It
was introduced by philologists around 1900 to replace the digraphhv formerly used to express the
phoneme in question, e.g. by Migne in the 1860s (Patrologia Latina vol. 18).
The Byzantines had a unique o-u ligature () that, while originally based on the Greek alphabet's -
, carried over into Latin alphabets as well. This ligature is still seen today on icon artwork in Greek
Orthodox churches, and sometimes in graffiti or other forms of informal or decorative writing.
Gha (), a rarely used letter based on Q and G, was misconstrued by the ISO to be an OI ligature
due to its appearance, and is thus known (to the ISO and, in turn, Unicode) as "Oi".
The International Phonetic Alphabet formerly used ligatures to represent affricate consonants, of
which six are encoded in Unicode: , , , , and . One fricative consonant is still represented
with a ligature: , and the extensions to the IPA contain three more: , and .
Rarer ligatures also exist, such as ; ; ; ; (barred AV); ; , which is used in
medieval Nordic languages for /o/ (a long close-mid back rounded vowel),[19] as well as in some
orthographies of the Massachusett language to represent /u/ (a long close back rounded vowel); ;
; , which was used in Medieval Welsh to represent // (the voiceless lateral fricative);[19] ; ;
; ; and .
Symbols originating as ligatures[edit]

Et ligature in a humanist script.

The most common ligature is the ampersand &. This was originally a ligature of E and t, forming
the Latin word "et", meaning "and". It has exactly the same use in French and in English. The
ampersand comes in many different forms. Because of its ubiquity, it is generally no longer
considered a ligature, but a logogram.
Like many other ligatures, it has at times been considered a letter (e.g., in early Modern English); in
English it is pronounced "and", not "et", except in the case of &c, pronounced "et cetera". In most
fonts, it does not immediately resemble the two letters used to form it, although certain typefaces
(such as Trebuchet MS) use the design & in the form of a ligature.
Similarly, the dollar sign $ possibly originated as a ligature (for "pesos", although there are other
theories as well) but is now a logogram.[20]
The Spanish peseta was sometimes symbolized by a ligature (from Pts), and the French
franc was often symbolized by an F-r ligature ().
Alchemy used a set of mostly standardized symbols, many of which were ligatures: (AR, for aqua
regia), (S inside a V, for aqua vitae), (MB, for a marian bath or double boiler), (VB, for a vapor
bath), and (aaa, for amalgam). In astronomy, the dwarf planet Pluto is symbolized by a PL
ligature, .

Digraphs[edit]

Uppercase IJ glyph appearing as the distinctive "broken-U" ligature in Helvetica rendered by Omega TeX
Comparison of and y in various forms

Digraphs, such as ll in Spanish or Welsh, are not ligatures in the general case as the two letters are
displayed as separate glyphs: although written together, when they are joined in handwriting
or italic fonts the base form of the letters is not changed and the individual glyphs remain separate.
Like some ligatures discussed above, these digraphs may or may not be considered individual
letters in their respective languages. Until the 1994 spelling reform, the digraphs ch and ll were
considered separate letters in Spanish for collation purposes.
The difference can be illustrated with the French digraph u, which is composed of the
ligature and the simplex letter u.
Dutch , however, is somewhat more ambiguous. Depending on the standard used, it can be
considered a digraph, a ligature or a letter in itself, and its upper case and lower case forms are
often available as a single glyph with a distinctive ligature in several professional fonts
(e.g. Zapfino). Sans serif uppercase glyphs, popular in the Netherlands, typically use a ligature
resembling a U with a broken left-hand stroke. Adding to the confusion, Dutch handwriting can
render y (which is not found in native Dutch words, but occurs in words borrowed from other
languages) as a -glyph without the dots in its lowercase form and the IJ in its uppercase form
looking virtually identical (only slightly bigger). When written/typed as two separate letters, both
should be capitalized or not to form a correctly spelled word, like IJs or ijs (ice).

Latin alphabets that use special ligatures[edit]

Danish and Norwegian
Faroese
French
German
Icelandic
Swedish

Non-Latin alphabets[edit]
See also: Complex Text Layout
The Devanagari ddhrya-ligature ( + + + = ) of JanaSanskritSans[21].

Ligatures are not limited to Latin script:

The Brahmic abugidas make frequent use of ligatures in consonant clusters. The number of
ligatures employed is language-dependent; thus many more ligatures are conventionally used
in Devanagari when writing Sanskrit than when writing Hindi. Having 37 consonants in total, the
total number of ligatures that can be formed in Devanagari using only two letters is 1369, though
few fonts are able to render all of them. In particular, Mangal.ttf, which is included with Microsoft
Windows' Indic support, does not correctly handle ligatures with consonants attached to the right
of the characters , , , , and , leaving the virama attached to them and displaying the
following consonant in its standard form.
The Georgian script includes (uni), which is a combination of (oni) and the former
letter (vie).
A number of ligatures have been employed in the Greek alphabet, in particular a combination of
omicron () and upsilon (), which later gave rise to a letter of the Cyrillic scriptsee Ou (letter).
Among the ancient Greek acrophonic numerals, ligatures were common (in fact, the ligature of a
short-legged capital pi was a key feature of the acrophonic numeral system).
Cyrillic ligatures: , , , . Iotified Cyrillic letters are ligatures of the early Cyrillic decimal
I and another vowel: (ancestor of ), , , , (descended from another ligature, , an
early version of ). Two letters of the Bosnian, Macedonian and
Serbian Cyrillic alphabets, lje and nje (, ), were developed in the nineteenth century as
ligatures of Cyrillic El and En (, ) with the soft sign (). A ligature of ya () and e also exists:
, as do some more ligatures: and .
Some forms of the Glagolitic script, used from Middle Ages to the 19th century to write some
Slavic languages, have a box-like shape that lends itself to more frequent use of ligatures.
In the Hebrew alphabet, the letters aleph and lamed can form a ligature (). The ligature
appears in some pre-modern texts (mainly religious), or in Judeo-Arabic texts, where that
combination is very frequent, since [] [a]l- (written aleph plus lamed, in the Hebrew script) is the
definite article in Arabic.
In the Arabic alphabet, historically a cursive derived from the Nabataean alphabet, most letters'
shapes depend on whether they are followed (word-initial), preceded (word-final) or both
(medial) by other letters. For example, Arabic mm, isolated , tripled (mmm, rendering as initial,
medial and final): . Notable are the shapes taken by lm + alif isolated: , and lm + alif
medial or final: . Unicode has a special Allah ligature at U+FDF2: .
Urdu (one of the main languages of South Asia), which uses a calligraphic version of the Arabic-
based Nasta`liq script, requires a great number of ligatures in digital typography. InPage, a
widely used desktop publishing tool for Urdu, uses Nasta`liq fonts with over 20,000 ligatures.
In American Sign Language a ligature of the American manual alphabet is used to sign "I love
you", from the English initialism ILY. It consists of the little finger of the letter I plus the thumb
 and forefinger of the letter L. The letter Y (little finger and thumb) overlaps with the other two
letters.
The Japanese language uses two ligatures, one for hiragana, , which is a vertical writing
ligature of the characters and , and one for katakana, , which is a vertical writing ligature
of the characters and . Both ligatures have fallen out of use in modern Japanese.
Lao uses three ligatures, all comprising the letter (h). As a tonal language, most consonant
sounds in Lao are represented by two consonants, which will govern the tone of the syllable.
Five consonant sounds are only represented by a single consonant letter ( (), (m), (n),
(l), (w)), meaning that one cannot render all the tones for words beginning with these sounds.
A silent indicates that the syllable should be read with the tone rules for , rather than those
of the following consonant. Three consonants can form ligatures with the letter . += (n),
+= (m) and += (l). () and (w) just form clusters: () and (w). (l) can
also be used written in a cluster rather than as a ligature: (l).
In many runic texts ligatures are common. Such ligatures are known as bind-runes and were
optional.
Chinese ligatures[edit]

A Chinese chngy (expression) written as a ligature. It reads Kng Mng hoxu () and means "to
be as studious as Confucius and Mencius."

See also: Polysyllabic Chinese character

Written Chinese has a long history of creating new characters by merging parts or wholes of
other Chinese characters. However, a few of these combinations do not represent morphemes but
retain the original multi-character (multiple morpheme) reading and are therefore not considered true
characters themselves. In Chinese, these ligatures are called hwn () or hsh ();
see polysyllabic Chinese characters for more.
One popular ligature used on chnti decorations used for Chinese Lunar New Year is a
combination of the four characters for zhoci jnbo (), meaning "ushering in wealth and
fortune" and used as a popular New Year's greeting.
Chinese ligatures

A Chinese ligature for zhoci jnbo(), a popular New Year's greeting

The Conm () ligature combining the three constituent characters

In 1924, Du Dingyou (; 18981967) created the ligature "" from two of the three characters
(tshgun), meaning "library".[22] Although it does have an assigned pronunciation
of tun and appears in many dictionaries, it is not a morpheme and cannot be used as such in
Chinese. Instead, it is usually considered a graphic representation of tshgun.
In recent years, a Chinese internet meme, the Grass Mud Horse, has had such a ligature associated
with it combining the three relevant Chinese characters , , and (Conm).

Similar to the ligatures were several "two-syllable Chinese characters" () created in the
19th century as Chinese characters for SI units. In Chinese these units are disyllabic and standardly
written with two characters, as lm "centimeter" ( centi-, meter) or qinw "kilowatt".
However, in the 19th century these were often written via compound characters, pronounced
disyllabically, such as for or for some of these characters were also used in Japan,
where they were pronounced with borrowed European readings instead. These have now fallen out
of general use, but are occasionally seen.[23]

Computer typesetting[edit]
TeX is an example of a computer typesetting system that makes use of ligatures automatically.
The Computer Modern Roman typeface provided with TeX includes the five common
ligatures ff, fi, fl, ffi, and ffl. When TeX finds these combinations in a text, it substitutes the
appropriate ligature, unless overridden by the typesetter. Opinion is divided over whether it is the job
of writers or typesetters to decide where to use ligatures.

Some example ligatures in Latin script

The OpenType font format includes features for associating multiple glyphs to a single character,
used for ligature substitution. Typesetting software may or may not implement this feature, even if it
is explicitly present in the font's metadata. XeTeX is a TeX typesetting engine designed to make the
most of such advanced features. This type of substitution used to be needed mainly for typesetting
Arabic texts, but ligature lookups and substitutions are being put into all kinds of Western Latin
OpenType fonts. In OpenType, there are standard liga , historical hlig ,
contextual clig discretionary dlig and required rlig ligatures. These can be enabled
in CSS3 using font-feature-settings .[24]
CSS also supports font-variant-ligatures . common-ligatures , discretionary-
ligatures , historical-ligatures and contextual are supported.[25]

This table below shows discrete letter pairs on the left, the corresponding Unicode ligature in the
middle column, and the Unicode code point on the right. Provided you are using an operating
system and browser that can handle Unicode, and have the correct Unicode fonts installed, some or
all of these will display correctly. See also the provided graphic.
Unicode maintains that ligaturing is a presentation issue rather than a character definition issue, and
that, for example, "if a modern font is asked to display 'h' followed by 'r', and the font has an 'hr'
ligature in it, it can display the ligature." Accordingly, the use of the special Unicode ligature
characters is "discouraged", and "no more will be encoded in any circumstances".[26] Note, however,
that ligatures such as and are never used to replace arbitrary "ae" or "oe" sequences "does"
can never be written "ds".

Microsoft Word does not enable ligatures automatically. Here, with Gill Sans Light, the 'f' and 'i' appear
superimposed when default settings are used.

Notably, Microsoft Word does not enable ligatures by default, partly for backward
compatibility reasons due to its long history. This can be changed from the Advanced tab of the Font
dialog box.