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DigraphsDigraphs, such as ll in Spanish or Welsh, are not ligatures in the general case as the two letters are displayed as separate glyphs: although written together, when they are joined in handwriting or italic fonts the base form of the letters is not changed and the individual glyphs remain separate. Like some ligatures discussed above, these digraphs may or may not be considered individual letters in their respective languages. Until the 1994 spelling reform, the digraphs ch and ll were considered separate letters in Spanish for collation purposes. The difference can be illustrated with the French digraph u, which is composed of the ligature and the simplex letter u. Dutch ij, however, is somewhat more ambiguous. Depending on the standard used, it can be considered a digraph, ligature or letter in itself, and its uppercase and lowercase forms are often available as a single glyph with a distinctive ligature in several professional fonts e.g. Zapfino. Sans serif uppercase IJ glyphs, popular in the Netherlands, typically use a ligature resembling a U with a broken left-hand stroke. Adding to the confusion, Dutch handwriting can render the y as a ij-glyph without the dots in its lowercase form and the IJ in its uppercase form also without dots looking virtually identical only slightly bigger. The Y is not found in natively Dutch words. |
Typographic ligatureIn writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes are joined as a single glyph. Ligatures usually replace consecutive characters sharing common components and are part of a more general class of glyphs called "contextual forms" where the specific shape of a letter depends on context such as surrounding letters or proximity to the end of a line. |
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