Long s and ligature ct

Many 18th century books or newspapers have curious long s, and ligatures.

Long s is used where s occurred in the middle or at the beginning of a word, except that in the combination sf a short s is used instead.

long-s

Long s is derived from Roman cursive medial s, so it is also called medial s.

The long s has a f-like nub at its middle, but on the left side only, thus many OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology misread the long-s as an "f".

There was no nub in its italic typeform, which gave the stroke a descender curling to the left, thus it is also called descending s.

Long-s Italic typeform

The character c in quaint ligature ct looks like Greek letter epsilon, or a French cedila on head of c.

ct ligature

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