Do Ligatures Form Automatically?

[74extiger]

Assuming the Font supports them and the right character pair is typed in? Such as FF, FT.

I'm using Garamond Pro family, but there are others in which I'd like to form ligatures.

(in other words, does this require keyboard input?)

[Thomas Phinney · Accepted solution]

It depends on several things:

- does the application support automatic ligatures?

- does the font have the ligatures in question?

- are the ligatures in question "standard" ligatures, or are they perhaps discretionary or historical ligatures? The latter kinds have to be turned on, while the former should be on by default in savvy applications.

When you say "Garamond Pro" are you referring to Adobe Garamond Pro, or Garamond Premier Pro? (Both are from Adobe.)

Neither has cap FF and FT ligatures, but both have "ff" and they might both have "ft" (I'd have to check.)

Regards,

T

[74extiger]

My oversight. I meant ff and ft, not FF/FT.

My documents would be primarily in MS Word 2004. I looked under their Help menu, and in Preferences, Font controls, Style and could not find any selection opportunity for Ligature.

I've got the entire Adobe Font Library. I used Garamond Pro as an example. It is specifically Adobe Garamond Pro package. But my question would apply to a whole range of Serif fonts. Goudy, Century, Baskerville.

Say I am looking in Font Book. Would a character with a ligature capability show up in the preview window?

[Thomas Phinney]

Hmmm, so you're on a Mac using Word 2004.

Word for Mac started supporting automatic ligatures with Word 2008. In that version, it is a document-level preference/setting. But you're out of luck with Word 2004. Word for Windows did not add such support until Word 2010. Word 2010 (Win) and 2011 (Mac) actually support a number of additional fancy typographic features of this sort.

Also problematic is that most of your fonts on Adobe Font Folio only have the fi and fl ligatures and nothing else. That would be true for about 90% of the fonts. Maybe 5% have also ff, ffi and ffl, and another 5% may have even more ligatures. For the Adobe versions of the fonts you mention, such as Goudy Oldstyle, Century and New Baskerville, I think all those have just fi and fl.

Regards.

T

[74extiger]

2004 will run better on my G4 machine. It's about time to navigate over to an Intel chip Mac Pro and to upgrade to Office 2011.

Following your advice, I honed my skills a bit on Font Book and began examining the Character Repertoire rather than just Samples. It was a bit surprising to see which fonts have only a few ligatures and which are more full-featured. So, I learned something afterall.

Gary Curtis

Los Angeles