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comment by StJohn
StJohn  ·  3873 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Great Diamond Disc Experiment

It's a typographic ligature — basically a fancy way of writing two characters so they're joined up in some way. It's used in printed books all the time, although they're usually so subtle you don't notice them. I wanted to use the "st" ligature on my blog because it's a slightly old-fashioned flair that I've always liked.

How they copy might depend on your browser (i.e. whether it treats them as one glyph or two joined glyphs), but they should always paste as two separate characters. The joining all happens in the font, so the text itself is made up of regular "s"s and "t"s ­— no funky Unicode characters required.