Problems with alef-lam ligature in Jali Variable font

[Ayandeh]

Hi, I am having problems with the Adobe Jali Variable Arabic font. The two letters Alef and Lam should be automatically a ligature, but they aren't doing it (mostly), apart from when using the Extra Light font. See first screenshot attached.  I can adjust the weight of the font up to 299 and it is OK, but after that the ligature disappears.

The even more frustrating part is that in one of the Character Styles I set up in my current document it does work correctly (see second screenshot, with font at 270 weight), and I have no idea why. The Paragraph Style is the same and I have tried comparing the settings in the character styles and don't see any differences. If I now change the font weight in that Character Style, the ligature goes away.

I am hoping somebody has had the same problem and found away to resolve it.

Thanks!

[Zachary Quinn Scheuren]

So far I can't repro this InDesign 18.5.0.57. If you can provide a zip of the file you have that shows the problem then that would help debug.  

[Ayandeh]

Thanks Zachary, I have attached a file. Text in red has the problem, text in blue is OK. My Indesign was only 18.5 so I updated to the latest to see if that fixed the problem, but no difference. Thanks for your assistance. 

[Zachary Quinn Scheuren]

If I look at your document in InDesign 18.5 both red and blue marked glyphs display the same. Are you seeing something different? I don't see anything display the wrong way that you showed in your first screenshots. 

[Ayandeh]

Thanks Zachary, that's not how they appear for me (see screenshot attached). I had hoped the new Harfbuzz composer in InDesign 19 might have resolved the problem, but it didn't. My OS is still Monterey 12.6, could that be the issue?

[Zachary Quinn Scheuren]

Ok, I suspected maybe the font version was different and confirmed it here. The current version when activated with Adobe Fonts is 1.003. I removed it and installed the previous version 1.002 and then I see the same issue from your screenshots. I also confirmed what you said originally where changing the weight in 1.002 makes the lam-alef ligature change at weight=300. Version 1.002 has the lam-alef ligatures in the dlig feature and 1.003 puts them in the rlig feature so they will always be on by default. If you remove the font from Adobe Fonts and then activate again you should get the updated font.  

[Ayandeh]

Thanks Zachary! Thats resolved the problem.

I had thought that activating fonts through my creative cloud subscription meant I would always be using the latest version of the font, didn't know I neeeded to remove old versions and add new ones again.  I will try the same thing for some other problematic fonts, eg Noto Sans Devanagari Variable that doesn't compose a few characters correctly (although the static versions of that font does), hoping the new Harfbuzz composer engine and maybe an updated font fixes that problem!

[Zachary Quinn Scheuren · Accepted solution]

I'm glad that fixed it. Updating automatically could introduce things like text reflow or other unintended changes with no warning so right now it's required to manually deactivate and reactivate. For Noto you should be sure to get the latest from GitHub https://github.com/notofonts/devanagari/releases and if there's still a problem with that font you can open an issue there.