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A
aaronk28490633
Participating Frequently
April 16, 2018
Question

Which factors decide the amount of spacing at which a ligature is divided

  • April 16, 2018
  • 1 reply
  • 2542 views

Hello,

at first I hope I'm using the wright english words to make the problem understandable, if not please ask.

InDesign decides at a certain letter spacing to divide a ligature into his original Letters. This certain amount of spacing is different at every font. So which factors decide this certain amount of letterspacing at which the ligatures are divided? (There must be factors, otherwise it would be the same amount of letter spacing at every font) I'm creating fonts so its important for me to know the parameters InDesign uses to calculate this amount of letterspacing.

Thank you very much in advance!

Aaron

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1 reply

Steve Werner
Community Expert
Steve WernerCommunity Expert
Community Expert
April 16, 2018

Ligatures, as I understand it, are created by the designer of the font. You can discover which ligatures the font designer included by using the Glyphs panel. As such you can't edit the space between the glyphs they contain.

Here's a short discourse on how ligatures came to be:

https://practicaltypography.com/ligatures.html

A
aaronk28490633Author
Participating Frequently
April 16, 2018

Thanks you for your answer. Shure you can't change the space between the glyphs a ligature contains but you can change the letterspacing of a ligature in InDesign...as you say, by doing this nothing will happen to the ligature itself. But at a certain amount of letterspacing (mostly between 16 and 27) InDesign will divide the ligature back into separate Glyphs, in your example "f" and "l". And this amount of letterspacing, at which the ligature gets divided automatically by InDesign is different for every font. Since it is InDesign itself that divides the ligature at this point (Not the code of the font), there must be factors for InDesigns calculation of this amount of letterspacing at which a ligature gets divided (Since InDesign calculates a different amount of letterspacing needed to divide ligatures for every font its not a fixed amount for every font). My Question is: What are these factors?

A
aaronk28490633Author
Participating Frequently
April 16, 2018

Hi Aaron,

tracking is one factor.
Justification of a paragraph could be another one.

In conjunction with an amount of tracking…

Regards,
Uwe


Hi Uwe,

shure justification divides the ligature. But it only divides it because the letterspacing you inserted is ignored when you turn on the justification (So as long as the letterspacing needed for justification in this line is high enough, the ligature is divided). But It´s still the same amount of letter space needed to achieve this. A justification in which the line fits perfectly won't divide the ligature.

To come back to the topic:

I´m not searching for factors in InDesign, that divide a ligature. (Like Kerning, justification etc.)

I´m searching for factors InDesign uses to calculate the amount of letterspacing at which the ligatures are divided.

(So is it for example calculated with the proportions of the font, or is the x-hight a factor (I already checked a lot of possible factors and found nothing yet))

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