Typophile

Dlig = No kerning in InDesign?

Göran Söderström

I cant seem to get any discretionary ligatures (dlig) work with kerning in InDesign CS3, is this a known bug?
It is not anly my own fonts that doesnt seem to work – that's why I ask.

What kind of font? GPOS or kern table kerning?

Arno Pro has a few Discretionary Ligatures and AFAICT they all seem to be getting kerned in InDesign CS3. (The 'ck' dlig below is only available to German).

It's an OpenType PS font with OT kern feature, the c_t ligatures are in the classes and work in FontLab.

Adobe Jenson Pro Regular doesnt work either. They seem to be working on the left side like your example above, but not on the right side of the ligature. Look here, for instance.

All my fonts have the same behaviour, they work on the left side, but not on the right.

Ok, it must a bug. Arno Pro and Meta doesnt either have the kerning on the c_t ligature. I have not opened them up in FontLab, but since the "t" have kerning against "o" I guess the developers of such great fonts must have put the "c_t" in the proper class.

Bugger!

Is this definitely limited to dlig ligatures, or are other variant feature glyphs affected?

Yes there's a bug, but the Discretionary Ligatures are getting kerned on the right side. Just look at this other example:

The overlay clearly shows that there's the same amount of kerning between 'pV' and 's_pV'.

The bug is that the kerning value is being incorrectly displayed as zero in the UI.

Thanks pointing this out!

Ah, great! It is kerned, but it doesnt show. Well, that is so much better than if it was not kerned at all.

Good you sorted this out Miguel – thanks :)

Goran,

for a moment, I thought that the bug is about the horribly huge gap between "a" and "c" that shows in Meta, but I guess that one is not a bug, it's a feature :)

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