ligature, ligament

After seeing a street sign like those pictured, featuring a few letters combined as a single glyph, I wondered about what allowances are given to these classy but antiquated examples of paleography. Curiosity yielded former requirements for such presentation in order to maintain a level of economy and to maximise the amount of text that could be fit on a page, though various methods. Researching a little bit, and courtesy of Nag on the Lake, I came across an interesting vignette on the development and history of typography in the West. I wonder what sort of champions are out there in the age of WYSIWYG and without the pressure for brevity in taxonomy.