What font is used in this image

Question

What font is used in the following image (the target font):

I used multiple online tools, such as https://www.whatfontis.com and https://www.myfonts.com/pages/whatthefont, to find the matching font, but the closest I could find is Apple Chancery. I reproduced the above image by typing it in Apple Chancery, and I get the following:

This matches almost with the target font except:

• in the target font, the "t" in "chest" and "understand" has a tail that connects to the preceding "s"
• the "t" in these words is also more curved
• the cross stroke in the "t" in Apple Chancery is longer than the target font

Answer 1

It is Apple Chancery but using alt characters. Apple Chancery has a lot of alternative characters and ligatures, they let you add or remove flourishes, here's a sample.

I'd stress that too much of this can look overcooked (even the top line looks a bit much to me), it's the kind of thing you have to use with restraint.

An alternative typeface with a good range of alt characters is Poetica by Adobe which is cross-platform and not just for Apple platforms. Also there is an open-source type by Pablo Impallari based on this style with tons of alts, he stopped working on it while it was in beta but it seems pretty much finished. It's more delicate with tall ascenders, it would work well for larger sizes. Or you could use Requiem from Hoefler/Monotype if you wanted an upright companion font in the same style. The general word for this style of typeface is "chancery italic".

I'm not a CSS expert but to activate ligatures you use code like font-variant-ligatures: discretionary-ligatures; and for swashes font-feature-settings: "swsh"; . Font handling on modern apps treat these character variants as a way of styling text, not a separate set of characters, so that the underlying text isn't changed.

Answer 2

ITC Zapf Chancery Italic. The connected letters are ligatures. In OpenType encoding there are five ligature sets, standard, discretionary, historical, contextual, and required. ITC Zapf Chancery supports standard and discretionary ligatures.

Standard ligatures are carried over from postscript encoding, which carried over from lead typesetting. Their purpose is to avoid collisions between letter pairs which otherwise would have overlapping parts. Depending on the typeface, the top hook of the "f" would intersect the dot of the "i", so the "fi" ligature was created. Other standard ligatures include "ff", "ffi", "ffl", "ft" and "fft".

Discretionary ligatures are more decorative than standard ligatures. These include “ck,” “ct” and “st”. These are some of the ligatures available in OpenType fonts:

Answer 3

Apple Chancery with ligatures.