Skip to main content
M
Mike Wickham
Inspiring
June 23, 2015
Answered

Can FrameMaker 2015 Handle Ligatures?

  • June 23, 2015
  • 1 reply
  • 675 views

In a recent webinar, Kapil Verma mentioned FrameMaker 2015's ability to handle ligatures, but he only touched on the subject very briefly and in the context of a demo of right-to-left languages in an Arabic font. Arabic glyphs are completely foreign to my eye, so I couldn't see any change and the discussion was too brief. So did I hear right that FrameMaker 2015 can handle ligatures?

    This topic has been closed for replies.
    Correct answer smart_play16B8

    FrameMaker 2015 only supports automatic/mandatory ligatures, which are enforced by the language. For example following characters: क(0x0915), ्(0x094d), ष(0x937), when written sequentially would form ligature क्ष. So the answers to your questions are:

    1. No, FM 2015 only supports automatic ligatures, as explained above.
    2. There is no direct setting, but in case someone wants to turn-off automatic ligatures, he can insert Zero-Width-Non-Joiner(0x200C) character between the code points that are forming a ligature.
    3. Searching and spelling is done on the basis of physical buffer, therefore ligature shouldn't have any impact.
    4. You can follow point 2 mentioned above, which is standard Unicode way to turn-off automatic ligatures.


    Let me know  in case you have any further questions!


    Thanks!

    Harsh Gupta

    FrameMaker Engineering

    1 reply

    Bob_Niland
    Community Expert
    Bob_NilandCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    June 23, 2015

    re: So did I hear right that FrameMaker 2015 can handle ligatures?

    What are your expectations for "handle"?

    • automatically or at least trivially convert certain character pairs to their Unicode ligature code point?
    • search/sort/spell-check hand-entered ligatures as the deconstructed character pair?
    • convert legacy overlay-font ligatures to Unicode code points?
    • faking it with tight metrics, presumably controlled by some menu option

    Not that I know the answer, but I'm curious about what the actual question is.

    M
    Mike WickhamAuthor
    Inspiring
    June 23, 2015

    In the webinar, it appeared that Kapil did some operation that made an

    automatic substitution of some character pairs for ligatures, but I

    didn't catch what the operation was, other than changing the font family

    in the paragraph designer to "Arabic Typesetting."

    I also just found this in a search on an Adobe web page describing the

    features of FM 2015: "Benefit from language-specific features such as

    ligature and diacritic support" at

    http://www.adobe.com/products/framemaker/features.html, under

    "Bidirectional language support." So there must be some capability, but

    searching the help file found nothing.

    So, refining my question into several:

    1. Can FM 2015 be told to substitute certain character pairs for ligatures?

    2. Is there a setting to turn it on or off?

    3. How might that affect searching and spelling checks of words

    containing ligatures?

    4. Can the process be reversed, to turn ligatures back into normal,

    separate characters?

    smart_play16B8
    Adobe Employee
    smart_play16B8Correct answer
    Adobe Employee
    July 20, 2015

    FrameMaker 2015 only supports automatic/mandatory ligatures, which are enforced by the language. For example following characters: क(0x0915), ्(0x094d), ष(0x937), when written sequentially would form ligature क्ष. So the answers to your questions are:

    1. No, FM 2015 only supports automatic ligatures, as explained above.
    2. There is no direct setting, but in case someone wants to turn-off automatic ligatures, he can insert Zero-Width-Non-Joiner(0x200C) character between the code points that are forming a ligature.
    3. Searching and spelling is done on the basis of physical buffer, therefore ligature shouldn't have any impact.
    4. You can follow point 2 mentioned above, which is standard Unicode way to turn-off automatic ligatures.


    Let me know  in case you have any further questions!


    Thanks!

    Harsh Gupta

    FrameMaker Engineering

    Firefly Community Gallery
    Adobe Firefly

    Remix with Firefly Community Gallery

    Thousands of free creations to fall in love with and remix in Firefly.

    Explore now
    Terms & ConditionsAccessibility statement
    Using the community Terms of use Privacy Cookie preferences Do not sell or share my personal information ad choicesAdChoices