Anyone knows of a font that have more with the same encoding?

any connecting script font. :^p

any connecting script font. :^p

Just to illustrate this: Caflisch Script Pro (and I very much doubt this is anywhere near the record)

KLTF Litteratra is quite impressive, and it’s not a connecting script:

Note: This is only the lowercase, without caps, small-caps and titling alternates …

Another participant in the ligature count contest: Process Type Foundry’s Lingua.

Seeing this makes me wonder if we'll ever be able to do many -> many subs in OpenType.

eg:
sub t @u_accents by t.001 @u.002_accents

Being able to do that would make all those accented ligatures redundant with the bonus of smaller font files and faster development.

- David

It's quite clear we wont reach up to the scripts, that's for sure ;-)
Very nice to see all examples, keep em coming.

For comparison, a Devanagari font for classical Sanskrit could - in theory - comprise 40,358,340 ligatures, i.e. more than fourty million ligatures. However, for any language, there are tremendous phonetic restrictions, and therefore for Sanskrit, during my 2-year research, I could only find 800+ ligatures in attestable, quotable ancient Sanskrit texts.

A Dutch mathematician made for me combinatorics calculations based on phonetic restrictions I supplied to him concerning Sanskrit, and he arrived at 1,896,777 phonetically possible Sanskrit ligatures, i.e. nearly two million ligatures. His mathematical calculations (in German language) are found here

http://www.sanskritweb.net/sansdocs/mathe.pdf

So, before answering your question "How many ligatures a font can have?" you will have to find an answer to the question: "How many phonetical combinations are possible for a given language or for the languages to be covered by the font?"

What about Ed Interlock? It has more than 1000 ligatures.

As I understood from a talk at TypeCon, the new Tasmeem plug-in to Indesign ME sets Arabic by stroke, rather than by letter, building up a word stroke by stroke. I don't read Arabic, but in the demonstration it looked quite amazing, and takes the whole ligature issue to a new level.

So, before answering your question “How many ligatures a font can have?” you will have to find an answer to the question: “How many phonetical combinations are possible for a given language or for the languages to be covered by the font?”

Not that it's really important, the thread is just for fun – but I wrote "A standard Latin 1 font. Then automatically we can take away a whole lot of options. So think more of a Mac OS Roman font.

And I didnt ask that question you are referring to either really.

For creating complexity, ligatures aren't very smart.
Surely the trick is to use a small number of contextual alternates to create a large number of "snap-together" ligature combinations.

Aspect

Surely the trick is to use a small number of contextual alternates to create a large number of “snap-together” ligature combinations.

i agree, that's what prompted me to start a discussion discussing 'liga' vs. 'calt' instead of hijacking this one.

lots of thinking about ligatures for me today. in the morning it was filled with James Mosely speaking about early humanist types and showing Aldus' italic type for Virgil, which incorporates many ligatures. James argued that too many ligatures may actually harm reading, if they break up the word picture. in the afternoon, it was Indian scripts with Fiona Ross and the inevitability of conjunct characters. both quite thought provoking from my point of view.