Ligatures in quark? Please help me out.

tzekin21 October 2004 · 13:54

I need an advice.
Is there a way to make quark use st ligatures automatically? And also if the ligatures are found in an alternate font is there a way to use them automatically in quark, i.e. all instances of st in the text set in typeface X to be replaced by st ligatures from typeface X alternate? What I have is a document with lots of text and I want to replace all instances of st with a ligature of st from the alternate typeface from the same family.
I am using quark 6.1

In case I can not do this in quark is there a way to do the above things in InDesign CS?

Thanks for the help.

tzekin21 October 2004 · 15:03

I think too much work and no rest leads to stupid questions:-( Ok, I did replace what I needed manually with the find option in Quark but I still need to know if ther is an option to do this automatically? Maybe applescript?

TIA

timd22 October 2004 · 07:05

Use the find and change function (command + f) to find all instances of st and replace with the character, deselect ignore case and attributes and set the font you want.
Tim

beccabob2 November 2004 · 10:46

There is a command that lets set ligatures automatically. Go into Preferences>character>ligatures and check the box. I've always done this but on my current copy of Quark its not there so I'm having to do it by hand. If you come across this problem of no ligature check box can you let me know please?

Bec x

beccabob2 November 2004 · 23:59

I just found out that Quark for the PC (I know my mac hasn't arrived yet!) doesn't support ligatures!! Whats the point in that!!!?

Jordan Harper3 November 2004 · 02:38

FWIW, In Design will automatically replace ligatures as you type for both opentype and T1/TT fonts.

jordan

matteson4 November 2004 · 07:07

>Quark for the PC

I don't believe that the 'fi' and 'fl' ligatures are standard characters in a PC Type 1 font encoding -- though they are standard in the Mac encoding. I suppose Quark feels that it's not worth supporting automatic ligature substitution on PC platforms, despite the proliferation of OpenType faces that do contain those ligatures -- and many more.

That's only a guess as I haven't used XPress in donkey's years. InDesign is my Excedrin -- no more headaches.

beccabob4 November 2004 · 12:36

After spending the past week using Quark I have to say I'm quite happy to go back to Indesign, it may be full of bloatcode but its much easier to work with. Quark is faster on my pc (my powerbook will be here in 3 weeks!!) I've only had to use it because my typography tutor is a purist and insists that we use Quark.

gabrielhl5 November 2004 · 08:33

You know, I'd really like to understand what being a purist has to do with using Quark. :-)

Sadly (and this thread makes it sadder) I've recently applied for a position at a place I know only uses Quark. *sigh*

dgh8816 March 2005 · 09:51

I haven't tried this personally, but I believe you can edit your font in Fontographer and assign the st ligature to a key. That way you can just type in the st ligature much as you would type in fi or fl. (I'm working in Quark 4 on the mac.)

--Dan

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