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.pri...@verizon.net>
To: "Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms" <xetex@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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