Re: OT: Georgian road signs (Re: OT: Dvorak)

Tristan McLeay wrote:
>
> Oh indeed I can't stand this! The purpose of the
> fi ligature is to avoid drawing attention to something
> that's a bit ugly; this kind of fi ligature seems
> designed precisely to draw attention the fact that the
> font designer/document creator was smart enough
> to know that fi ligatures get used!
Well, the purpose of the fi (and fl) ligature was to
avoid breaking off the kern on an f. In metal hand-set
type, the hook of the f generally extends beyond the
body of the type. This extra piece is called a kern.
If the next letter is an i or l, there is no place for the
kern, and it will break off. So ligatures were developed.
In the old days when the long-s was in use, there were
ligatures for combinations such as sl, sh, sb, sk, etc.


> (I'm also a bit ambivalent about fonts like Palatino
> which have an fi ligature although they have no need
> for it, but retain the dot. It adds nothing and takes
> nothing away, but I'm not sure if this doesn't maybe
> cause it to take something away anyway...)
The Linotype machine was the first practical machine
for keyboard assembling of body type. It works by
assembling a line of matrices (molds) via keyboard,
the casting a bar of type against those molds. The
problem here is that kerning is impossible, so the
hooks on the letter f were shortened up so they
didn't extend beyond the body. But for aesthetic
reasons, they provided <fi> and <fl> ligatures on
single molds. These have their own keys on the
keyboard.

Linotype operators were trained to press the special
keys for the ligatures when they saw <fi> or <fl> in
the copy. Palatino was designed specifically for the
Linotype machine, so the f looks good without kerning
over the next letter.

But ligature matrices were still provided because
operators had been trained to press the ligature keys.
So even fonts such as Palatino (and most sans serif
fonts) had ligature matrices even if they are nothing
more than the f and i together on one mold.

Ligatures are not really needed in computer typesetting,
of course, but in many typefaces copied from metal
originals, they are kept for aesthetic (or just historical)
reasons. There is good reason to keep them in fonts
(such as Palatino) where they are not needed,
because if you set something in, say Caslon, using
ligatures, you can then switch the text to another
font, say Palatino, without the software needing to
know about substituting f and i for fi.

--Ph. D.
--who has a working hot-metal Linotype in his
--garage.

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