From the course: Typography: Advanced Font Techniques

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Discretionary ligatures

Discretionary ligatures

From the course: Typography: Advanced Font Techniques

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Discretionary ligatures

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- [Instructor] Ligatures are two or more glyphs fused together to form a single glyph. Usually, this is to avoid a collision in certain letter pairs. The lowercase fi and fl being the most common examples. These standard ligatures are turned on by default, but if you're working with a san serif typeface, you may wish to turn them off. I'll press Command or Control+T to bring up the Character panel and turn off the ligatures. Discretionary ligatures are used for decorative purposes and are often very specific to the font. You can turn them on or off as a batch, and you can also turn them on and off selectively using your type contextual controls. If you're using discretionary ligatures in a continuous body of text and need to see, at a glance, where they have been applied, there's a handy InDesign composition preference for that. I'll press W to show my guides. Select this text frame, and we will apply the discretionary ligatures. And then come to the Preferences, Composition. Windows…

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