Th ligature trouble

jupiterboy14 Mar 2008

I’m working with Zeppelin 31 in Indy CS3 and getting odd behavior from the Th ligature.

In Zeppelin the ligature works everywhere but the first word of the paragraph. If I change it to Walbaum the opening ligature is activated and the next in line separates.

Maybe someone else would experiment a bit and see if they get similar results.

Here’s and example.

jupiterboy14 Mar 2008#

Now that I’ve made a post and replicated with some Adobe fonts I’m thinking it is the justification settings. Doh!

dezcom14 Mar 2008#

I don't remember the units that trigger it but, at some point, ligatures get abandoned in favor of the pair of letters they are derived from. I wish there were some way to adjust your own threshold on an individual ligature basis.

ChrisL

Nick Cooke14 Mar 2008#

Yeah, I noticed that too Chris. It seems to have something to do with tracking; once the typeface starts to look too openly spaced it knocks the ligature feature off, which is quite sensible I guess as ligated pairs would look too tight.

In the example above the top line especially looks more widely tracked than the bottom three lines.

Nick Cooke

jupiterboy14 Mar 2008#

It is the tracking and justification settings working together.

The first thing I do is to track a font out to notice where the ligatures break. That helps me decide IF I want to use the ligatures.

The justification settings, which I have not finalized, added another layer of variance. When I hem in the letter spacing tolerance it comes back together and behaves.

I have not set justified text in a long time.

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