Ligatures are typographic replacement characters for certain letter pairs. Most fonts include ligatures for standard letter pairs such as fi, fl, ff, ffi, and ffl. In addition, some fonts include discretionary ligatures for letter pairs such as ct, st, and ft. Although the characters in ligatures appear to be joined, they are fully editable and do not cause the spell checker to flag a word erroneously.

Contextual alternates are alternate characters included in some script typefaces to provide better joining behavior. For example, when using Caflisch Script Pro with contextual alternates enabled, the letter pair “bl” in the word “bloom” is joined so that it looks more like handwriting.