[XeTeX] Accessing ligatures from FontForge

[John Was]

Dear David

Many thanks.  That looks exactly how I would expect it to be - though I am 
obviously not quite umderstanding what fontforge want me to do to get liga 
to work.  I will keep at it and no doubt the penny will drop eventually.

Best wishes


John
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Perry" <hospes.primus at verizon.net>
To: "Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms" <xetex at tug.org>
Sent: 23 February 2011 11:43
Subject: Re: [XeTeX] Accessing ligatures from FontForge


> John,
>
> I don't know if FontForge uses the same syntax as Adobe's FDK (also used 
> in FontLab), but I think it might.  Here's how I do <liga> in FontLab. (In 
> FL if you don't specify a script and language it applies Latin script and 
> the default language, which might be different in FontForge.)
>
> feature liga { # Standard Ligatures
>  # Latin
>     sub f f i by f_f_i;
>     sub f f l by f_f_l;
>     sub f i by fi;
>     sub f j by f_j;
>     sub f l by fl;
>     sub f f by f_f;
> } liga;
>
> The order of the ligatures is important; by putting the long ones (ffi, 
> ffl) before the shorter ones you make sure that the long ones get 
> processed correctly.  Ligatures are normally named by putting an 
> underscore between the components, but fl and fi are an exception in fonts 
> that follow the Adobe naming conventions -- which you are not required to 
> do, of course.
>
> There are indeed many fonts out there that have the ligatures in the 
> codepoints FB00 - FB04.  You may get better PDF searchability if you don't 
> use any Unicode values, though.  But using them will not cause a <liga> 
> feature to fail if it is otherwise set up correctly.
>
> David
>
> On 2/23/2011 3:19 AM, John Was wrote:
>> Thanks to everyone for the advice.
>>
>> I don't use XeLaTeX so don't employ commands such as
>> \defaultfontfeatures - this isn't how I access fonts in plain XeTeX.
>>
>> It's obvious (I think!) that I need to learn how to set up a liga table
>> in FontForge, and indeed I thought I'd done just that, but it's not
>> picking up the information. I'll have another look but since I can
>> access the characters by \char" I believe I can see a way forward from
>> within TeX (making the five characters active so that they invoke the
>> required \discretionary commands to generate correct hyphenation). The
>> only down side to that, which is not a great inconvenience, will be
>> globally searching on ffi, ffl, etc. to replace them with the Unicode
>> characters.
>>
>> But I hadn't realized that FB00 - FB04 were deplored as the positions
>> for these characters, and that may be part of the problem. (However, I
>> have examined my Monotype Baskerville outline font, and it does have the
>> five ligatures in those slots.)
>>
>> I'm sure all this is just the usual floundering of a newbie - I
>> expect/hope it will all become clear after I've climbed the learning 
>> curve.
>>
>> Best
>>
>>
>> John
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
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