On 11/30/13 5:37 PM, Gregory Ewing wrote:
wxjmfa...@gmail.com wrote:
And do you know the origin of this typographical feature?
Because, mechanically, the dot of the "i" broke too often.
In my opinion, a very plausible explanation.
It doesn't sound very plausible to me, because there
are a lot more stand-alone 'i's in English text than
there are ones following an f. What is there to stop
them from breaking?
It's more likely to be simply a kerning issue. You
want to get the stems of the f and the i close together,
and the only practical way to do that with mechanical
type is to merge them into one piece of metal.
Which makes it even sillier to have an 'ffi' character
in this day and age, when you can simply space the
characters so that they overlap.
The fi ligature was created because visually, an f and i wouldn't work
well together: the crossbar of the f was near, but not connected to the
serif of the i, and the terminal bulb of the f was close to, but not
coincident, with the dot of the i.
This article goes into great detail, and has a good illustration of how
an f and i can clash, and how an fi ligature can fix the problem:
http://opentype.info/blog/2012/11/20/whats-a-ligature/ . Note the second
fi illustration, which demonstrates using a ligature to make the letters
appear *less* connected than they would individually!
This is also why "simply spacing the characters" isn't a solution: a
specially designed ligature looks better than a separate f and i, no
matter how minutely kerned.
It's unfortunate that Unicode includes presentation alternatives like
the fi (and ff, fl, ffi, and fl) ligatures. It was done to be a
superset of existing encodings.
Many typefaces have other non-encoded ligatures as well, especially
display faces, which also have alternate glyphs. Unicode is a funny mix
in that it includes some forms of alternates, but can't include all of
them, so we have to put up with both an ad-hoc Unicode that includes
presentational variants, and also some other way to specify variants
because Unicode can't include all of them.
--Ned.
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