On 2011-04-07, Daniel CLEMENT wrote: > Dear list members, > I have been using the palatino font for a while. But I only recently > noticed that, in documents using this font, no ligatures appeared (e.g. > in ff, fi, ...).
Because there are no ligatures in Palatino -- by design. Looking at the URW Palladio font in my font-viewer (fontmatrix), I see that there is no ff ligature and that the fi and fl ligatures are "faked" (i.e. just two letters side by side). Looking at the TeX Gyre Termes system font with fontmatrix, I see all "T1 ligatures" but with a clearly separated fi (also in ffi) while, in contrast to URW Palladio, the ff has a common bar (also in ffi and ffl). Looking at the Palatino font sample chart in the TeX Font Catalogue, I see on page 2 the font table containing all ligatures required by the T1 font encoding -- but again "faked" (most probably via a virtual font). IAW - Palatino does not have ligatures and whatever appears as such is only a compatibility version filling the slot. > However, the various dashes (--, ---) do get linked properly. Aren't > these "ligatures"? This are rather input conventions for \textendash and \textemdash (ab)using the ligature mechanism in TeX's tfm files. > What do you think of this? I searched the WiKi and the list archive, and > I came across this message: > http://www.mail-archive.com/lyx-users@lists.lyx.org/msg45849.html > ...but it's pretty old, and perhaps no longer relevant. There is not much change in the standard Postscript fonts. Especially, considering the emphasis that TeX puts on consistent rendering of unchanged documents, there will be no change without a new option to the palatino/mathpazo packages. Günter
