John Jason Jordan wrote: > > I used to use ligatures when I was laying out books with InDesign. > InDesign handles them by storing the the text internally without > ligatures. Thus, if you copy and paste to another application that > application gets the internal non-ligatured text. If you run the spell > checker it checks the internal non-ligatured text. The ligatures appear > on screen and are used in print and PDF output only. > > InDesign does this so elegantly that it can even adjust the ligatures > for the requirements of hyphenation. Once I had the word "official" > near the end of a line. Both hyphenation and ligatures were turned on > as part of the paragraph style. Originally the word was the next to the > last word in the line, so it appeared on screen with the ffi ligature. > I needed to add a couple words to the beginning of the paragraph. When > I added them the word broke at of-ficial. And InDesign cleverly started > "ficial" on the next line using the "fi" lgiature for it. > > As for how many fonts have ligatures, all the Adobe Pro fonts do, at > least the standard f-ligatures. And they are coded so that Adobe > programs will use them as optional glyphs if the user turns on that > feature for a paragraph or character style. > > The problem OOo is going to have is that it does not yet support > OpenType fonts on Linux unless the font has TrueType outlines. All the > Adobe OpenType fonts have Type 1 outlines. I have a number of them > installed on my Linux computer and I can use them system wide with all > applications except OOo. If OOo wants to add support for optional > ligatures a la InDesign the developers are probably going to have to do > some serious work on how fonts are handled first. > > As for the esthetics, I like them and I don't like them. It depends on > what I am doing. If I am doing something that I want to give a somewhat > retro look to I definitely want ligatures. For a more modern appearance > the ligatures are less important. But having said that, it also depends > on the font. If the font is designed with an "f" that curves downward a > lot and ends in a big ball, it is going to look bad with an "i" jammed > next to it. But if the "f" is designed with only a slight curve at the > top and the curve ends smoothly, the "i" will look fine right next to > it. To me there is no "one size fits all" answer to the esthetics issue.
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