Stylistic ligatures

Many ligatures combine f with an adjacent letter. The most prominent example is fi (or fi, rendered with two normal letters). The dot above the i in many typefaces collides with the hood of the f when placed beside each other in a word, and are combined into a single glyph with the dot absorbed into the f. Other ligatures with the letter f includes fj,[2] fl (fl), ff (ff), ffi (ffi), and ffl (ffl). Ligatures for fa, fe, fo, fr, fs, ft, fb, fh, fu, fy, and for f followed by a full stop, comma, or hyphen, as well as the equivalent set for the doubled ff and fft are also used, though are less common. Sometimes, a ligature crossing the boundary of a composite word (e.g., ff in shelfful[3]) is considered undesirable, and computer programs (such as TeX) provide a means of suppressing ligatures. Some fonts include an fff ligature (the Requiem Italic font by Jonathan Hoefler contains even an fffl ligature), intended for German compound words like Sauerstoffflasche ("oxygen tank") and Schifffahrt ("boat trip") (the latter word is written with fff only if the writer follows the spelling reform of 1996). Official German orthography as outlined in the Duden however prohibits ligatures across composition boundaries, and since the sequence fff in German ever occurs only across such boundaries (Schiff-fahrt, Sauerstoff-flasche), these ligatures cannot be correctly employed for German.[4] Turkish has a dotted and dotless "I", with next to each other words like fırın ("oven") and fikir ("idea"). The fi ligature would obscure the distinction and is therefore not used in Turkish typography, and neither are other ligatures like that for fl, which correspond to rare letter combinations anyway.

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