[Tex/LaTex] N.B. ligature in Latex

Question

Wikipedia mentions a ligature for NB (nota bene), however I can't seem to find any reference to this in the latex literature. Is there a way to use this ligature in my latex document?

An example of the ligature:

Answer 1

To the best of my knowledge, there are no fonts out there (not even Junicode!) that provide a ready-made NB ligature.

It's actually not too difficult to create a composite NB glyph (not to be confused with a "true" ligature) by inserting a negative kern between N and B. However, for many font families the N-B composite is quite unattractive. It's a vivid reminder, IMNSHO, of the fact that creating a good-looking ligature requires a lot more work than just "snugging up" two or more glyphs.

The following screenshot shows possible NB candidates for 4 serif fonts and 3 sans-serif fonts. (If you wanted to use this in "real work", be sure to omit the \textcolor{red}{...} wrapper in the definition of \NB.)

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{xcolor} % for '\textcolor' macro
\newcommand\NB[1][0.3]{N\kern-#1em\textcolor{red}{B}} % default kern amount: -0.3em
\usepackage{fontspec}
\begin{document}

\setmainfont{Latin Modern Roman}
\NB --- Latin Modern Roman

\setmainfont{Times Roman}
\NB[0.265] --- Times Roman

\setmainfont{EB Garamond}
\NB[0.275] --- EB Garamond

\setmainfont{Trajan Pro}
\NB[0.385] --- Trajan Pro

\setmainfont{Latin Modern Sans}
\NB[0.27] --- Latin Modern Sans

\setmainfont{Helvetica}
\NB[0.24] --- Helvetica

\setmainfont{Futura}
\NB[0.295] --- Futura

\end{document}