What it means
A ligature is two or more letters fused into one designed shape. The standard ligatures in Latin text are fi, fl, ff, ffi and ffl: without them the hook of the f crashes into the dot of the i or the top of the l. They are not decoration; they exist to fix a collision. The ampersand began life as a ligature of e and t, and the German ß as a long-s and z.
Discretionary ligatures — st, ct, sp in some faces — are ornamental and belong in headings or display settings, not running text.
Professional typesetting substitutes standard ligatures automatically through the font's OpenType features. Two rules follow: never letter-space text that contains ligatures, because the joined glyph cannot be spaced apart, and check that the font actually has them — many web and system fonts do not, and a missing ligature is the first thing a trained eye notices on a printed page.
In Bindery
Bindery’s LaTeX typesetting applies a font’s standard ligatures as it sets the text — the same mechanism that gives its proofs proper fi and fl pairs.
Make the book, not the checklist
Describe a book or upload a manuscript. Bindery writes with you, typesets in LaTeX, sizes the spine from the real page count and produces printer-validated files — the watermarked proof is always free.
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