- Standard Ligatures are letters that are combined into a single character like the fi in find or the th in them.
- Discretiionary ligatures are more decorative than standard ligatures.
- Swash adds an extended flourish to a character, such as a long flourish on a serif.
- Stylistic alternatives are alternate characters of the same letter.
- Titling alternates are alternate versions of capital letters, usually used only on titles or headlines, and sometimes as the first word in a chapter or section.
- Ordinals are the superscript characters like you would see in addresses the numeric equavalent of words like first or second.
- Fractions lets you write fractions more elegantly using numerator and denominator positions.
You can apply the extended characters to all of the text or apply it only to selected letter or letters. More than one extended character type can be added to the same characters.
Next time we'll talk about the glyphs panel and I'll show you even more tricks using extended characters with OpenType fonts.
Continued in Part 2: Using the Glyph Panel in Illustrator CS5