[OfSanguineFire]

In many languages the task of a typesetter is inserting ligatures for when the author’s manuscript had simply written two separate letters. I wonder if the same is true of modern Dutch publishing, even if ordinary people write i+j.

Afrikaans seems to have done fine with just giving up on this letter/sequence of letters entirely.

[crote]

Most of it is just handled by selecting the proper font, which automatically gives you the proper ligature.

The interesting thing is that Afrikaans actually went the opposite direction as Dutch. Prior to 1863 Dutch used 'y' and 'ij' pretty much interchangeably, but a spelling reform made 'ij' the official spelling in Dutch. However, Afrikaans seems to have settled on 'y' and 'i', leading to things like the Dutch word 'tijd' being spelled 'tyd' in Afrikaans.