This is my latest embroidery, for Catherine Elizabeth May who was born just less than two weeks ago.
The font is Bickham Script Pro, and one of the things I liked about it (along with most of the fonts that I buy) is that it has proper ligatures. A ligature replaces a sequence of single characters with a single conjoined character, as shown in the example below:
(Quick typography fact – the most commonly used ligature is the ampersand, where et becomes &.)
What I didn’t notice until I was almost at the end of the embroidery, is that there are two th ligatures in “Catherine Elizabeth”, and they’re both different! In “Catherine”, the t is a single stroke, joining to the h from the crossbar. The upper loop of the h is also very wide, extending over the top of the following letter e. However at the end of “Elizabeth”, the t joins to the h from the bottom stroke, and the crossbar doesn’t join at all. The loop of the h is also much narrower.
I’m afraid that I’m not going to unpick an entire night’s worth of embroidery in order to make the two ligatures the same. What I am going to do is fiddle around in Photoshop, and try to work out why it decided to render the two ligatures differently.
Catherine says its lovely as it is – don’t unpick it. The difference in the ligatures is not something as simple as one h being in the middle of the word and one being at the end? The ligature in catherine overhangs the next letter but the lack of a ‘next letter’ after the th in elizabeth would necessitate a narrower loop to stop the letter looking too top heavy maybe… I know only a little about calligraphy and its much less scientific than typography but if I was writing it, I’d be looking for a single straight line from the bottom of the h to the outside of the curve for the loop.