Ligatures

In typography, a ligature is a single glyph made up of more than one character. Ligatures can be functional or ornamental. A good example of a functional ligature is the combination of the letters f and i. In many typefaces the dot of the i crashes into the arch of the f, and the ligature resolves the overlap of letters and improves letter spacing. The typefaces shown here are Adobe Caslon, Eames Century Modern and Adobe Garamond Pro: the second two also contain the ff and ffi ligatures in their glyph set.