I came across the following text while going through TeX documentation:
textcompwordmark
This command is used to separate letters which would normally ligature. For example
fi
is produced withf\textcompwordmark i
. Note that thef
andi
have not ligatured to producefi
. This is rarely useful in English (shelfful
is a rare example of where it might be used) but is used in languages such as German.
Since ligature was a new word for me, I immediately referenced my dictionary and found that:
Noun: ligature
Character consisting of two or more letters combined into one
Wikipedia entry shows an example as:
So, it means that the horizontal cross line in f
is merged with the next character. But, I do not see something similar happening in the text when shelfful
is being written. I'd assume that the horizontal lines of both f
s in ff
would get merged when writing, but this should be happening to each and every word which has ff
appearing in them.
Why is such that all references (at least the ones I saw) only point out shelfful to be the rare example? Why not scaffold or afford or effort etc.?
PS: For the scope of this question, I'm restricting to ligatures with the leading character f
only.