There are two very different things involved here.
As John said in his reply, if you use the tex-text mapping then the en-
and em-dash TeX shorthands should work fine. These are not ligatures in
the true sense of the word (I know they are referred to as such in TeX,
unfortunately) and will not operate the way that true ligatures such as
fi will since they rely on TeX-savvy software rather than using features
built into modern fonts.
For the true ligatures, I think your problem comes from using fonts of
different ages and different technologies. Hoefler Text is an up to
date AAT font with many advanced typographic features, including
standard ligatures. Standard ligatures should be on by default, so it's
not surprising that they work. This font might very well contain ct and
st ligatures also, but under a different name (discretionary or rare or
something; use the OS X Typography palette in TextEdit or some other
native Mac word processor to check this out).
I suspect that Apple Garamond is an old font without AAT or OT features;
I'm on a Windows machine right now so I can't check. The old MacRoman
character set contains the dashes and the fi and fl ligatures, and these
were traditionally accessible on the keyboard (my US keyboard has
different strokes than the ones you mention, but I think that's just a
function of French vs US keyboards). If you enter them directly, XeTeX
is _not_ translating anything, but just passing along the characters you
entered.
HTH - David
On 11/20/2010 6:07 AM, Jean-Claude Raoult wrote:
Hello,
My problem : getting ligatures with (plain) XeTeX, the engine being pdfTeX with
TeXShop.
I am using XeTeX on a iMac under OS X leopard, with a french keyboard (since I
am french).
The coding used is UTF-8.
A few tests with my preferred fonts (sorry, I am very traditional):
Apple Garamond (very similar to Monotype Garamond), Baskerville and Hoefler
Text :
The ligatures -- and --- will work neither with Apple Garamond, nor
Baskerville, nor HoeflerText.
The ligatures fi, fl and ff will work with Hoefler Text, fi and fl with
Baskerville, none with Apple Garamond.
However, the ligatures --- (—), fi (fi) and fl (fl) exist on the keyboard as<alt> -,<alt> g
and<alt><shift>G.
If they are typed as such, XeTeX does translate them into the proper ligatures.
Therefore, they exist in Apple Garamond… and what about st and ct ?
I am not fond of diving into metafont. Would anybody know how to get them
without butchering into
XeTeX tables ?
Jean-Claude Raoult
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