Ligatures and letterforms like the "long S" (ſ) actually arose as a result of printing, interestingly. If you look at 13th century manuscripts created in Norman England, they're extremely legible and regularized. The very earliest printed texts ("incunabula") produced in England tried to mimic this medieval blackletter script, and are actually quite easy to read if you get used to them. By the Elizabethan era, many typesetters were switching to Italian-derived forms that they thought looked more distinct and elegant in a letterpress context (serif fonts like Garamond). German printers kept working with the medieval style, however, giving rise to the Fraktura script that we now tend to associate with WW2-era Germany.

I wrote a bit about the ſ letterform here:

http://theappendix.net/blog/2013/7/why-does-s-look-like-f-a-...