"There must be a kerning button somewhere in here"
ChrisL

To kern, FORMAT--FONT in the CHARACTER SPACING tab.
Insert ligs manually from the INSERT--SYMBOL menu.

Really? Insrt mannually?

ChrisL

Create your documents with InDesign?

You can use find and replace to find fi and fl and replace with ligatures.
Tim

I had to do a find and replace throughout my entire dissertation for those evil little buggers.

I always create my own documents with InDesign. It is only when other parts of my working world impose on me to "just use Word" (with that all-knowing smile) that I dare open the devil's Wordshop.
I find it amazing that I would have to do a search and replace to put in ligatures in text but can shot-gun blast a document with cute little clip-art excrement as easy as pie.
I hope that Tiffany's class was the last one to have to do a typography dissertation with Word. I can see some bright young Reading grad student doing a brilliant thesis on the history of ligatures and the modern OpenType usage of them only to have to search and replace them in after each draft. Maybe if they wrote it without any words using fi, fl, ffi, or ffl?

ChrisL

By the way Tiffany, I never thanked you properly for your dissertation. I have only grown to appreciate it more since seeing the "Dwiggins Fest" at TypeCon.

ChrisL

PS: it is a good thing he called it the "M Theory"instead of the "fi Theory" :-)

You can record a macro in Word that does all the necessary ligature substitution, and assign it it to a keyboard shortcut.

That's the solution I settled on more than a decade ago. I'm still doing it that way.

Chris, you are more than welcome, I'm glad my research is helping another type designer. I'm also very happy that the DwigFest turned out so well and so many seemed to leave with a greater appreciation for all that Uncle Bill has done.

Thanks Edward. I will try that.

ChrisL

ChrisL

Chris, what's your secret? Where do you get all the images to illustrate your posts? Do you have a library of (tagged) images at the tip of your fingers? Or do you run out the door with a digital camera, take the shot, and run back to the computer just in time to post it? Eh?

To me this is much bigger mystery than ligatures in Word ;^)

Google images Miguel.

ChrisL

Searching and replacing ligs is not always the very best idea, at least in some languages where there are grammatical exceptions where not to use a ligature. E.g. in German there is no ligature to be set in composita where the words are joined (Auf-lösung, not Au-flösung). But anyway, it became quite common to use ligs there with people who just discovered that their fonts do have a nice feature called ligature…

Thanks Stephan!
I guess the main thing that bothers me is that in OpenType, this could be handled quite nicely with Locale or contextually yet Microsoft, one of the fathers of OpenType, does not support liga in their flaghip application! It is not like they don't know how to do it?

ChrisL

ChrisL,
can you give me an example of a font/application combination where OpenType ligatures actually works and produces correct output? After my last posting I tried it with Indesign CS and Times Italic, Zapfino and Adobe Jenson Pro. Results in German language are not conform to the rule I explained in the last post. Indesign still makes Au-flösung and au-ffinden, even with an automatic ffi-ligature if there's one available. I tried the same using TextEdit and the standard OpenType treatment of OS X 10.3.9, with similar results.
The only workaround seems either to use a discretionary hyphen where the words join (this only seems to work while writing the text and before the auf-f-inden is substituted with a ffi-ligature). Both applications give up their wrong ligatures if you kern e.g. at auf|finden.
Any suggestions?
So the "Wordly mysteries" do not only apply to the big MStery called Wörd.
My way would be to use a typesetting system that relies on dictionaries and is really capable of handling ligatures. I've had good experiences with LaTeX in that respect.
And never trust the software (may it be a layout software or an OpenType font) you're using, it is always only as good as its developers knew what they were doing…
The alternative would be (a) to stop using ligatures at least in the languages that "the software" does not know the rules of, (b) use fonts where fl, fi etc. look just the same as fl, fi (that is the case with many standard sanserifs, see
span style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif" =)

Stephan,
I have never actually seen the example you posed but it should be possible to make it work with OpenType where in Locale, the ffi ligature is ommited in German when following au. This is similar to Turkish omission of Latin ligs. I hope either Thomas Phinney or Adam Twardoch are available to be more specific about the feature coding.

ChrisL

Chris,
true, true. I am sure that this is possible with OpenType, only it is hard to have all the different norms of various cultures and languages encorporated in one piece of software. That is because most type designers are not linguists (of course, vice versa most linguists also won't care about whether their texts have correct ligatures as long as it looks ok and someone has made a nice layout for it).
Regarding the above example: I am quite sure that there are no german words that begin with "auf" followed by "fi/fl" and still need a ffi/ffl lig. Same goes for most of the words that start with the prefix auf- (and therefore should not have a fi or fl lig in this place), but although I admit that I had to think a little: there are instances in German where au may be followed by a fi or fl lig. All the words that start with fi/fl and have a prefix auf- should have a fi/fl, but not a ffi/ffl lig.
Does some major foundry look for a consultant in german typography norms? ;)

Both FontFont and Linotype are based in Germany and should certainly know all the ins and outs of German typography. I would think any of their original opentype fonts would be thoroughly tested in German. Maybe Dan Reynolds or Erik Spiekermann will notice your post and clarify it for us.

ChrisL

My understanding has always been than OpenType couldn't help here yet. Perhaps language tags could aid designers, but these don't have application support, and a font does not have a dictionary inside of it.

Most fonts do not include any ligatures in them other than fi and fl. Of course it is excellent when the designer includes ff, ffi, ffl, etc. Then again, there are other types that have been so designed so that they do not require ligatures at all.

You kids and your Unicode. Back in my day, if I wanted ligatures, I'd have to wrestle with arcane proprietary character mappings. If I was using, say, MinioMM_367 RG 585 NO 11 OP, first I'd have to change the font to MinioMMEp_367 RG 585 NO 11 OP. Then I'd have to make substitutions as follows:

• ff → V
• fi → W
• fl → X
• ffi → Y
• ffl → Z

And I liked it, dammit!

Another downer, Chris, is that in Word, once you've got your ligatures in (be it manually or by macro), the spell checker doesn't recognise the words as correctly spelt any more. So you'd better leave it until all copy-editing/proof-reading is finalised!
Dontcha jus' love it?

_____________________________________________________
Ever since I chose to block pop-ups, my toaster's stopped working.

Dave, This sounds like Quark 4 as well. You had to wait until the client had finished all multitudinous changes before expert set was added. Spell check just loves ligs :-/

ChrisL

Edward, you shoud’ve used a font other than Minion as an example, ’cos you know, it ain’t that old… “Back in my day…” Whatcha talkin’ ’bout, yesterday? Gotcha! ;^)

"Back in the day..."
How about this then Lari? :-)

ChrisL

Windows Vista, as far as I know will feature a native OpenType support in its presentation engine. Compare the two images (that are by the way, not mine).

Hopefully its native applications, like Notepad and Wordpad, will follow suit. How about Office 2007? Any news about OpenType support from that front?

Darn, missed the DwigginsFest too.

>Hopefully its native applications, like Notepad and Wordpad, will follow suit.

The funny thing is, presently (as of Windows XP) you can get ligatures to work in Notepad (and probably Wordpad as well, but I can't remember). Support for ligatures might even have been available since Windows 2000. Simon (a.k.a. Si) will know for sure.

Lari, the whole idea of the "back in my day" bit is to start with something relatively recent, so that subsequent posters can have fun outdoing each other with successively older -- and increasingly preposterous -- examples.

So I guess I jumpted too far back with Cunieform? But I am really that old after all :-)

ChrisL

As I recall, support for ligatures was available as far back as WordPerfect 5.1. It just had a falling out with WSIWIG.

Office 2007 does not support OpenType layout features for western languages any more than previous versions of Office.

However, PowerPoint finally supports kerning (even if it is hidden away weirdly and not on by default).

T

Thanks Thomas.

ChrisL

Do we have the reason why ligature support was dropped with the coming of the WYSIWYG?

As for the OpenType layout features for Western Language in Office 2007, I don't even recall that the program can auto replace glyph in the first place. Mr. Simon Daniels, however, has pointed me on how to enable autolig on Notepad. I haven't tried it, though, so I have yet to see whether the new feature would apply to other programs or not.

Folks,
I'm not a professional typographer or designer, and make do with Microsoft Word for most of my basic desktop publishing needs (can't afford/justify the more expensive dedicated design software, for the limited use I would make of it). I'm just wondering: is there some reason why Microsoft chooses not to incorporate OpenType features in Microsoft Word? I work in a university setting, where it would be really nice to use some of the alternate-glyph and other OpenType features without having to do search-and-replace, or (worse) manually inserting the characters I want. I know these features are probably considered a luxury or superfluous to many users, but it would be nice to have them available, for those times when I really want to "pull out all the typographic stops" without having to invest in another piece of software. Do you think it's too much to ask for in a word-processing programme these days? Is there any chance that the forthcoming edition of Word might finally include these features, for us non-professionals who try to use our limited resources to produce the best typographical output we can?
I'd be grateful if anyone has any insight into these questions, which I'm sure many other people are asking as well.
All the best,
MurrayK