How to access Ligatures??

[rcraighead]

I downloaded Baskerville URW expecting to see ligatures as they appear on the Adobe download page and I see them in the Glyph panel, but double-clicking the gliph returns the standard characters. How do I access them? When I open the "OpenType" panel all options are grayed out along the bottom.

AI CC 2020, Mac

[Ton Frederiks]

Looks like a bug. Ligatures are recognized in Indesign for Baskerville URW, but not in Illustrator.

https://illustrator.uservoice.com

[rcraighead]

Thanks Ton. I tried this on my home Mac (2011) and am able to double-click glyphs to place ligatures in text block but "Standard Ligatures" is grayed out in "OpenType" panel. Same in AI CC 2015 and 2020.

I was hoping to turn on "Standard Ligatures" so they would auto-populate when entering text. Does a font have to be "OpenType" for this feature to work?

[Ton Frederiks · Accepted solution]

Ray, according to the Document Info panel in Illustrator, it is an OpenType font.

[rcraighead · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the tip about the "document Info" panel.
I've reverted to our standard "Baskerville TrueType" font and can access "fi" and "fl" ligatures with "Shift+Opt+5 & 6".

We can automate conversion with a script for production purposes. 

Thansks for the help, Ton!

[Ton Frederiks]

Good to hear you got it working (in a way). I think it would be a good feature request to have automatic ligatures (if available) and not only ligatures defined as OpenType Ligatures.

[Ton Frederiks]

But the InDesign type engine is smarter than the one in Illustrator and Photoshop.

[ZBalling]

No kidding! Consdering ffi [U+FB03 : LATIN SMALL LIGATURE FFI] is copied as U+000E!! https://community.adobe.com/t5/acrobat/bug-in-unicode-processing-of-a-ligature-%EF%AC%83-u-fb03-lati...

[Ton Frederiks]

?

I can copy your 

ffi

and paste it as

ffi

U+FB03

[ZBalling]

Well, it does not work in Acrobat Pro on PC, did you check the link?

[Ton Frederiks]

I could copy the ligature from the PDF and paste it in Illustrator.

This is the Illustrator forum.