Ligatures in Microsoft Word

Ligatures, in case you didn't know, are letters that have been mashed together as one character. Why would anyone want that? For aesthetic reasons. (Yes, there is an ae ligature for words like "aesthetic.") The ligatures used most often are fi and fl, accompanied by their friends ff, ffi, and ffl. That's because these letter combinations really do look kind of ugly in many fonts, with the dot on the i running into the top of the preceding f, and so on.

You can set ligatures automatically in dedicated typesetting programs like QuarkXPress and InDesign. In Microsoft Word, it's not so simple. But it is possible. Here's how:

1. Have a font that includes ligatures. You probably already have several, even if you don't know it.

2. In Microsoft Word, click "Insert."

3. Click "Symbol."

4. On the "Symbols" tab, make sure there's a "Subset" dropdown list on the right. If there's not, pick a different font from the "Font" list on the left. (If you've got Palatino Linotype, you've hit the jackpot.)

5. Scroll down the "Subset" list until you find a subset called "Alphabetic Presentation Forms." Or, easier still, click in the list and then press the "A" key on your keyboard until you come to "Alphabetic Presentation Forms."

6. Somewhere in the characters displayed will be some ligatures, probably fi and fl but maybe others as well. Click one of them, then click "Insert," and then click "Close."

You should now have a ligature in your document--in Microsoft Word, of all places! Of course, you'll want to use ligatures from a font that you're using for the rest of your document so that everything matches up nice and pretty. You'll probably be surprised at how good the ligatures look.

I doubt that you'll want to insert all those ligatures by hand in an existing document. Instead, you can insert them using Word's Find and Replace feature. For example, you can find "fi" and replace it with the fi ligature character. If the ffi and ffl ligatures are available, you should find and replace those character combinations *before* doing fi, fl, and ff. Otherwise, the fi, fl, and ff in the ffi and ffl letter combinations will be replaced with the fi, fl, and ff ligatures--not good. (Try saying that last sentence three times really fast.) If the ffi and ffl ligatures are *not* available, you may not want to use fi and fl either, for the same reason. (If you like, you can record the whole Find and Replace procedure as a macro that you can use again on future projects.)

If you need more information about finding and replacing special (Unicode) characters, you'll find it here:

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1710421080

And now, a caution. Using ligatures will foul up spell-checking for the words in which they are used, because Word will see the words as misspelled. For that and other reasons, you should keep a backup of your original file as a source document and consider the file containing ligatures as a presentation document. You can learn more about this here:

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1709632986

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READERS WRITE

Last week's newsletter included an article on making a wildcard dictionary and asking for your help in compiling one by submitting your favorite wildcard strings with a brief explanation of what they do. Some readers have been kind enough to send them in, but others are still holding out. Come on guys--you know who you are! Please send your niftiest wildcard creations here: mailto:editor [at symbol] editorium.com. Thanks!

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RESOURCES

Want to see the old-fashioned approach to using ligatures? Here's the scoop:

http://www.orbitals.com/self/ligature/ligature.htm

Will Harris presents an informative and persuasive argument *against* using ligatures at his strikingly designed Web site:

http://www.will-harris.com/ligatures.htm