Oh! Those Poor, Poor Ligatures
Last week I was reading a novel — can't remember which one so its publisher will be spared the embarrassment — when I was distracted by ugly typesetting. The occasion was the author's use of the word "affiliated".
There was a period, a brief dark ages of pseudo-typesetting. generally thought of vulgarly as "output", when computers and the unsophisticated word-processing programs that typically ran on them (WordStar, WordPerfect, & Word come to mind) were unable to carry on the centuries-old traditions of using typefaces with ligatures (among other failings). They thought they were pretty clever for doing right justification with Courier, and then being able to handle proportional fonts–woo hoo!
Of course, that was not really a technical limitation but a failure of imagination mixed with a lot of naivete, rather similar to the popular reaction when Microsoft added multitasking to a dressed-up version of their DOS. Incredibly, people thought they invented it, little realizing that it was a common feature of real operating systems long before the PC appeared. What a shame that they didn't do a bit of homework and implement pre-emptive multitasking as they should have.
And so, it was also popularly thought that proportional type and justification and fonts were a recent invention of word-processing purveyors. This overlooks, of course, the craft of typesetting as practices in the previous five centuries. The concurrent misconception that justification was beyond the capability of personal computers until then, quite overlooking that Don Knuth's fabulous TeX system did expert typesetting, with sophisticated typesetting of mathematical expressions, already c. 1982. It still justifies a paragraph of text with more grace and elegance than any line-oriented word processor I know of.
Yet another feature of the long history of typesetting that disappeared with word processors was ligatures. (A bit about ligatures, with pretty pictures.) There's really no excuse for it — TeX easily handled ligatures from its earliest implementations. Rather than technical limitations it seem more likely to me that the wizards (well, program designers) at Microsoft just hadn't heard of them.
It's a pity. Bad typesetting ruins the flow of the text and interrupts the reader's involvement. As I mentioned, in this horrible instance it was the word "affiliated".
Everyone–positively everyone–knows that there are a few vital ligatures in English typesetting, to wit: fl, fi, and ffi. These days, too, it's not all that hard to accomplish, particularly if one is a professional typesetter working for a commercial publisher.
Now, it wasn't as if "affiliated" was set without any ligatures at all. No, no, no, it was worse. Instead of using an "ffi" ligature, or just setting "f", "f", and "i", they used an "fi" ligature: "f" + "fi".
It was ugly, ugly, ugly!
Thank you, I do feel better now.
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on Tuesday, 15 September 2009 at 21.56
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Does "Qu" qualify as a ligature? I love the way The New Yorker type font prints the letter combination, with the Q having a long tail that reaches right across under the u. That used to be standard in type-setting too, but, alas, apart from The New Yorker, it seems to have disappeared.
on Tuesday, 15 September 2009 at 22.31
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"Last week I was reading a novel … when I was distracted by ugly typesetting"
I was caught by your surreal first sentence — that, and relieved that someone finally exposed the horrors of lack of ligatures! I can imagine how ugly that f & fi would have been. It is a shame that the long tradition of beautiful typesetting wasn't taken into account with 'new' computer programs. Sigh. It is ever thus.
on Tuesday, 15 September 2009 at 23.19
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Bill, I don't really know. Ligatures are "connected" sets of letters, shown as touching, sharing parts, or connected. For the overlapping New Yorker's Qu, where the Q has an extended descender, the "Q" and "u" likely would have shared a slug of lead in the days of metal typesetting, but is it a ligature or just kerning? (This discussion, http://typophile.com/node/19376, seems to be about whether "Qu" together is rightly called a ligature or not, and it seems just about as productive as one would expect.)
Melanie, it's up to us to maintain standards, at least for a little while longer. Typesetting is probably one of the very few things about which I might be called "conservative".
on Wednesday, 16 September 2009 at 07.20
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how about being conservative on the ugly-in-its-redundancy locution "two-year-anniversary"? Or any other whole-number-of-years version thereof, though usually single digits. Or even "nine month anniversary".
it causes me to get all-over-curmudgeonly, muttering darkly about "ann__" in "anniversary" referring to a year, so it's the "second anniversary" or whatever, and "nine month anniversary" doesn't work at all (maybe "0.75 anniversary", but that's even uglier, if consistent).
kids these days! but even Rachel Maddow used it last night. Sigh.