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In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes or letters are joined as a single glyph. An example is the character ''æ'' as used in English, in which the letters ''a'' and ''e'' are joined. The common ampersand (&) developed from a ligature in which the handwritten Latin letters ''e'' and ''t'' (spelling ''et'', meaning "and") were combined.〔("The Ampersand & More" ) with Kory Stamper, part of the "Ask the Editor" video series at Merriam-Webster.com〕 ==History== At the origin of typographical ligatures is the simple running together of letters in manuscripts. Already the earliest known script, Sumerian cuneiform, includes many cases of character combinations that over the script's history gradually evolve from a ligature into an independent character in its own right. Ligatures figure prominently in many historical scripts, notably the Brahmic abugidas, or the bind rune of the Migration Period Germanic runic inscriptions. Medieval scribes, writing in Latin, increased writing speed by combining characters and by introduction of scribal abbreviation. For example, in blackletter, letters with right-facing bowls (b, o, and p) and those with left-facing bowls (c, e, o, d, g and q) were written with the facing edges of the bowls superimposed. In many script forms characters such as h, m, and n had their vertical strokes superimposed. Scribes also used scribal abbreviations to avoid having to write a whole character at a stroke. Manuscripts in the fourteenth century employed hundreds of such abbreviations. In hand writing, a ligature is made by joining two or more characters in a way they wouldn't usually be, either by merging their parts, writing one above another or one inside another; while in printing, a ligature is a group of characters that is typeset as a unit, and the characters don't have to be joined—for example, in some cases fi ligature prints letters f and i more separated than when they are typeset as separate letters. When printing with movable type was invented around 1450,〔(Johannes Gutenberg and the Printing Press )〕 typefaces included many ligatures and additional letters, as they were based on handwriting. Ligatures made printing with movable type easier, because one block would replace frequent combinations of letters, and also allowed more complex and interesting character designs, which would otherwise collide with one another. Ligatures began to fall out of use due to their complexity in the 20th century. Sans serif fonts, increasingly used for body text, generally avoid ligatures, though notable exceptions include Gill Sans and Futura. Inexpensive phototypesetting machines in the 1970s, which did not require journeyman knowledge or training to operate, also generally avoid them. The trend was further strengthened by the desktop publishing revolution around 1985. Early computer software in particular had no way to allow for ligature substitution (the automatic use of ligatures where appropriate), and in any case most new digital fonts did not include any ligatures. As most of the early PC development was designed for and in the English language, which already saw ligatures as optional at best, a need for ligatures was not seen. Ligature use fell as the number of employed, traditionally trained hand compositors and hot metal typesetting machine operators dropped. A designer active in the period commented that "some of the world’s greatest typefaces were quickly becoming some of the world’s worst fonts." Ligatures have grown in popularity over the last twenty years, however, due to an increasing interest in creating computer typesetting systems that evoke classic designs and older books. One of the first computer typesetting programs to take advantage of computer-driven typesetting (and later laser printers) was the TeX program of Donald Knuth. Now the standard method of mathematical typesetting, its default styles are explicitly based on nineteenth-century models. Many new fonts feature extensive ligature sets: these include FF Scala, Seria and others by Martin Majoor and Hoefler Text by Jonathan Hoefler. Mrs Eaves by Zuzana Licko contains a particularly large set to allow designers to create ostentatious, dramatic display text with a period feel. A parallel use of ligatures has been in the creation of script fonts that adjust letterforms to join up and simulate handwriting effectively. This increase has been caused by the increased support for other languages and alphabets in modern computing, many of which use ligatures extensively. This has caused the development of new digital typesetting techniques such as OpenType, and the incorporation of ligature support into the text display systems of OS X, Windows and applications such as Microsoft Office. An increasing modern trend is to use a 'Th' ligature to reduce spacing between these letters, a trait with little precedent in metal type. In font programming, ligatures are separated into three groups, which can be activated separately: standard, contextual and historical. Standard ligatures are needed to allow the font to display without errors such as collision of characters. Contextual and historic ligatures may be desired (or not) by a designer to create effects or evoke old-fashioned printing. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Typographic ligature」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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