

An intelligent discussion on ligatures for 'wtf' and 'lol' - marketer
http://typophile.com/node/16343

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jrockway
LOL WTF! Just kidding.

Normal ligatures look like the letters they represent. Look at "fish" for
example. The ligature exists to make the dot on the i not conflict with the
overhanging part of the f. These WTF and LOL ligatures don't look anything
like the word they replace, so they should just be called "random new
characters", not ligatures.

Also, not all commonly used words get a special character. The, an, is, be,
are, are more common than "et" and "at", but they don't have their own
character.

Anyway, I think this is more of an art project than anything else.

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whacked_new
More artistic than intelligent, IMHO, but very interesting, especially to see
a forum so "moderated" by "creative forces."

Also, it seems incorrect to call those ligatures: WP says those are when >= 2
graphemes combine into one glyph. i.e., the "fi" in print, or the Æ and such.

Offtopic, found this cool character on the WP page: Ѽ.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligature_>(typography)

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mhb
Piggy butt?

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whacked_new
my first thought was tomato :)

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pierrefar
I remember diving into ligatures when I was hacking my thesis in LaTeX. The
geekiness of learning LaTeX made writing up tolerable.

And the output was spectacular, if only in looks and not in content :)

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DougBTX
Not Startup News, but a very nice thread which I enjoyed reading.

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emmett
Not startup news, but definitely hacker news. See the jargon files for more of
the same kind of hackers at play.

