Greek ligatures

In early printed Greek from around 1500, many ligatures fashioned after contemporary manuscript hands continued to be used.

Important models for this early typesetting practice were the designs of Aldus Manutius in Venice, and those of Claude Garamond in Paris, who created the influential Grecs du roi typeface in 1541.

The ου ligature is still occasionally used in decorative writing, while the καὶ abbreviation has some limited usage in functions similar to the Latin ampersand (&).

Letters derived from the ου ligature exist for use in Latin, and for Cyrillic, though not for Greek itself.

Some attempts have been made at recreating typesetting with ligatures in modern computer fonts, either through Unicode-compliant OpenType glyph replacement,[3] or with simpler but non-standardized methods of glyph-by-glyph encoding.

Early Greek print, from a 1566 edition of Aristotle.
The sample shows the -os ligature in the middle of the second line (in the word μέθοδος), the kai ligature below it in the third line, and the -ou- ligature right below that in the fourth line, along many others.
18th-century typeface sample by William Caslon , showing a greatly reduced set of ligatures ( -ου- in "τοῦ" , end of first line; -στ- in πλείστοις , middle of second line; and the καὶ abbreviation).