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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?

MW Design
MW Design
Inspiring
April 16, 2018

Thanks for your answer and for asking the developer, this could really help!

To your other question. Due to the english words I'm not sure if I understand the word "mapped" wright, but if a ligature appears in InDesign it has to appear somewhere in the code of the font. So somewhere is this line (sub f f h by f_f_h;). So with this line Indesign also knows of which parts the ligature consists of. If you mean that the ligature is not mentioned in the ligature section of the code and you can only insert it with the glyphs panel in InDesign I have no idea how InDesign knows of which letters the ligature consists to divide it, I think its not possible. 


I'm still awaiting a response for one of the behaviors--and it's the main one, the how of it all.

But I was informed that in QXP, there is actually a preference setting to control whether two-character or more ligs can break apart. I don't know why one wouldn't want them to when tracking is so increased that the spacing would be just odd, but it is controllable.

I couldn't find a corresponding setting in ID's preferences. If it is there but hidden, though, it may be addressable via scripting. Dunno. But like I mentioned, I don't know why the default behavior of either application isn't appropriate off the top of my head.

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