Do you mean the long s (ſ) or the ligatures involving the long s (ß)?
_____________________________________________
Personal Art and Design Portal of Ivan Gulkov
www.ivangdesign.com

option+s = ß

Long s: ſ

Jon.

There are no easy ways to access characters outside the standard codepages.

You may try:
-The hex input keyboard layout
-The character palette (Command + Option + T)
-Third party tools like PopChar
-Third party replacement tool (to create your own replacements) like TextExpander, Typinator or RapidoWrite

!

Gotcha. Thanks all!

Jon.

question about the long s:

have you ever used it in modern typography for any current reasons?

I realized now how silly a sans-serif ſ looks and that's probably because I've never seen one in sans before.

Have you ever seen/used ſ in sans or recently?

I've used it a cople of times for setting faux-antique labels and signs.
Now Þorn is something I always wanted to use, but never found a practical application for.
_____________________________________________
Personal Art and Design Portal of Ivan Gulkov
www.ivangdesign.com

I think the long S is more recognizable than thorn, unless you're in iceland of course ;)

I've used it a good bit in my thesis since I'm quoting from a book from the 17th century.

I agree with oprion too, I'd love to use thorn but between not being terribly recognizable outside of the linguistics / typography / Icelandic community, it goes the way of fraktur or the long s. I suppose you could print a book of Old English poetry and use that along with the æ-macron :)

«El futuro es una línea tan fina que apenas nos damos cuenta de pintarla nosotros mismos». (La Luz Oscura, por Javier Guerrero)

Have you ever seen ſ in sans recently?

Yes, only last week in Martin Z. Schröder’s Druckerey blog.

I'm currently reading a book recommended by John Berry on his blog: The Stories of English by David Crystal. There are thorns galore in the Old and Middle English quotations. Along with some yoghs and a few wynns.

-- K.

Have you ever seen ſ in sans recently?

I put a long s and long s ligatures in Hypatia Sans. But I'll freely admit it looks a bit silly, and it may not have been such a great idea.

T

btw, just for the record Thomas, you have a wonderful name ;-)

Where can I get Hypatia sans? I've seen the page on Adobe's site but it doesn't really tell me where I can get it.

I hear you're still working on some italics for it, I sure can't wait to see those!

Tom, at the moment Hypatia is only available as registration incentive. If you need to upgrade to CS3 now you have a good reason.

I've got CS3 but I'm not seeing any incentive with registering here :(

And now would be a silly time to upgrade if I hadn't with CS4 in the oven :) I can't wait for CS4!!

I was looking for the long-s just now and oddly I could not find it in my [latest] PopChar - but the blessed Google brought me straight to this thread, so thanks for the keyboard shortcut.

Cheers,

Colin
--
No furniture so charming as books. Rev Sydney Smith, 1771 -1845

Option-s is the German eszett. In some typefaces it looks like a long-s-plus-s ligature, in others, not so much.

T