ABSTRACT
Ligatures are two or more characters that are joined to form a single character. Ligatures are used to keep different parts of characters from running into and/or overlapping each other when trying to set them properly. Lining numerals or numbers, also called lining figures, when used within text blocks can be distracting—they stand out too much because they are the same height as the capital letters. Lining figures are also called "tabular" figures because they have the same character width. Most open type fonts contain small caps. In a block of copy aligned flush left, punctuation like apostrophes and quotation marks, occurring at the beginning of a line, make the line appear to be slightly indented, which disturbs the alignment. By default, typographer's quotes are on in the Type preferences. There should not be any space between the number and the prime mark. For mathematical equations and specifying dimensions, use the genuine minus and multiplication signs.
