I just bought Bickham Pro Font for $102.13 because I wanted all the beginning, ending ligatures, flourishes and other swashes. Back in 1990s, these were all separate fonts. How do I get these flourishes from what I just bought?

These are Unicode-encoded fonts. All the glyphs are in a single typeface. In InDesign or Illustrator, you use the Glyphs Palette for typing glyphs that are not directly accessible from the keyboard. For other applications (such as Microsoft Word), you use equivalent features that they might have.

Otherwise, you use the operating system's utility such as Windows' Character Map program to key in those special characters.

Note that for some programs, ligatures and swashes can be automatically obtained by enabling particular OpenType features for the current paragraph or character style or even an override of same.

          - Dov