An intelligent discussion on ligatures for 'wtf' and 'lol'

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.

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)

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 :)

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