sulei.uk — letters that join
Three kinds of ligature
Only one of them makes the letters touch · all faces OFL
1 · The standard set
Every text face ships these, and they are on by default. They tidy a collision; they do not draw attention. Fraunces has them, as does everything else.
fi fl ff ffi ffl
Fraunces · liga
2 · The historic set — these genuinely link
ct, st and the long s (ſ) come from hand-set type, where the pieces were cast as one. They are behind hlig, so they only appear when asked. This is the “letters joining” you are after.
ct st ſ fi ffi
IM Fell English — 17th-century recut. Long s, and the ct/st forms that actually touch.
ct st ſ fi ffi
IM Fell DW Pica — Same revival, lighter and more irregular — closer to worn metal.
ct st ſ fi ffi
EB Garamond — The cleanest historic set: ct and st join without looking antique.
ct st ſ fi ffi
Cardo — Medievalist scholar’s face. Deep historic set, very quiet texture.
ct st ſ fi ffi
Cormorant Garamond — Discretionary ligatures, not historic — ff and ffi swell rather than join.
3 · Scripts — the whole word joins
If you want every letter to connect, that is not a ligature, it is a script. Excellent in exactly one place on a site like this: a signature. Everywhere else it fights the ledger.
Sul
Parisienne
Sul
Mrs Saint Delafield
Sul
Tangerine
Used once, at the end of a letter or a CV, a script reads as a hand. Used for a heading it reads as a wedding invitation.
What I would do
Keep Fraunces as the display face — its ff and ffi already swell, and it has the presence you liked. If you want the historic joins specifically, the honest move is to set the signature and the CV date line in EB Garamond or IM Fell English, and leave the headings alone: mixing is legitimate when the second face has one job.
And a script, if at all, once: the signature at the foot of the CV.
Feature notes: liga standard · dlig discretionary · hlig historic. Subsetting must keep all three or the joins vanish without warning.