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Ligatures commonly found in liga

liga can hold any ligature at all. This page collects, script by script, what is recommended and what is done in practice, as a rough guide.

Latin

Section titled “Latin”

fi fl

Section titled “fi fl”

fi and fl have stayed in the standard glyph sets since before OpenType.

Standard fi fl
Adobe StandardEncoding 174 175
MacRoman 0xDE 0xDF
Standard Macintosh ordering in the post table 192 193
CFF Standard Strings SID 109 SID 110
WGL4 U+FB01 U+FB02
Adobe Latin 1–5 All levels All levels
Adobe-Japan1 CID 112 (Supplement 0) CID 113 (Supplement 0)
Adobe-KR CID 3002 (Supplement 0) CID 3003 (Supplement 0)

ff ffi ffl

Section titled “ff ffi ffl”

ff ffi ffl descend from Adobe’s Expert set.

Standard ff ffi ffl
CFF Standard Strings SID 266–268
Adobe-Japan1 CID 9358–9360 (Supplement 4)
Adobe-KR CID 3001, 3004, 3005 (Supplement 0)

When Glyphs generates liga automatically from glyph names, it covers fi fl ff ffi ffl.

Others

Section titled “Others”

Beyond the standards, ligatures like these turn up in liga.

  • fj ffj / ft tt / fb fh fk with ffb ffh ffk — extensions of the f combinations
  • IJ ij — Dutch digraphs

The following are added according to the character of the typeface.

  • or oo rr ar and other letter-to-letter connections in a script face
  • Ch Th bb dd gg and other combinations of a calligraphic face’s own
  • Apple’s SF families — 208 rules turning a letter followed by U+20DD (combining enclosing circle) into an enclosed character such as Ⓐ

Japanese

Section titled “Japanese”
  • Kana carrying handakuten (か゚ ク゚ ㇷ゚ and others)

Added in Adobe-Japan1-5, and part of the recommended GSUB distributed at adobe-type-tools/Adobe-Japan1.

Hiragino Mincho ProN, Hiragino Kaku Gothic, Hiragino Maru Gothic ProN and BIZ UDGothic carry them; Noto Serif JP does not.

Chinese

Section titled “Chinese”
  • Pinyin ligatures (Adobe-CNS1-7)

Arabic

Section titled “Arabic”
  • Word ligatures such as الله (Allah), لله (lillah) and ريال (the riyal sign)
  • Letter-to-letter ligatures such as لم (lam-meem) and combinations with a final noon

Arial, Tahoma and Times New Roman hold only the three word ligatures in liga. Letter-to-letter ligatures belong to traditional Naskh; Damascus has 22 rules.

To look for candidates, Unicode’s Arabic Presentation Forms-A (U+FB50–FDFF) is the only encoded list there is. Unicode itself notes that the set does not match what typefaces actually do, and is not for general interchange.

Syriac

Section titled “Syriac”
  • Sadhe+Nun, Lamadh+Lamadh, Nun+Alaph and others (Serto)
  • He+Yudh, Taw+Alaph, Taw+Yudh (East Syriac)

It varies by style. Among the Meltho fonts, Serto has 12–40 rules, East Syriac three, and Estrangelo zero to six.

Armenian

Section titled “Armenian”
  • ﬓ ﬔ ﬕ ﬖ ﬗ (U+FB13–FB17)
  • ու

Noto Sans Armenian is the one font this was confirmed in.

Sources

Section titled “Sources”