Letters vs. Ligatures [closed]

Question

I have come across some typography ligatures involving “f” and other letters as one glyph, I was wondering whether a ligature glyph is considered one alternate letter or still two letters after they are joined, I was also wondering if glyphs have their own names or how they are named if at all, similar to the case of the Bluetooth logo in which two runes, Berkana and Hagalaz are joined as a glyph ligature, is this considered an alternate rune or two individual ones, — Jack

Answer 1

Ligatures are presentation forms only; they are not in any way separate letters from those that compose them. In general, their use improves the appearance of text, mostly by avoiding “collisions” between various portions of the composing letters; an example of such a “collisions” can be seen in your example; in the last row, the top hook of the ‘f’ and the dot of the ‘j’ are colliding; a properly formed ligature would combine the two, as the ‘fi’ ligature in the first row shows.

This font is Georgia Pro; on the left are the letters ‘fi’ without ligature; the right shows the ligature for the same two letters. Note how the hook at the top of the ‘f’ is extended to the right, and the dot of the ‘i’ omitted, in the ligature, presenting a “cleaner” appearance.

The combination of runes that yields the commonly-recognized symbol for Bluetooth is not itself a rune, nor is it actually considered a combination of runes (though that may in fact be their origin) or ligature; the combined form is simply ‘the Bluetooth logo’.

Some ligatures are encoded in Unicode for historical reasons; those ligatures do have Unicode names (for example, U+FB01, ‘Latin Small Ligature Fi’). Others which have not been so encoded may not have separate names, though they may exist in fonts as targets for a ligature table enabled by the liga feature in CSS or OpenOffice.