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The middle spur of the minuscule “l” in French type designs, historically up to today.

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In doing some research I was reading through the historical brief of HTF Didot. About halfway down the page there are a couple of captions that talk about a spur placed midway the left side of lowercase /l/s. It evidently held traditional value.
I have done a bit of searching, but am having trouble finding more info about this detail of French typography. Does anyone know more about its usage: Why? What caused its decline in use, or are there still designs meant for general text that have this? If one were to include this detail in a typeface today would it be relegated to “a variant of the regular /l only, never the default”?
Perhaps it would cause a reader to stop for a moment at the unfamiliar detail, or be confused for another letter like /ƚ or /ł.
It is a small thing, but interesting. Any thoughts?


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