Reply To: InDesign adding unnecessary spaces — how to disable or work around?

It is an Unicode font. The script is called Mandombe, it is an African script, technically an alphabet that is arranged into syllable blocks, somewhat like Korean. Further details you can find on Wikipedia, if interested. While there exists at least one font out there already, currently I'm working on another one myself (a sample of which you've just seen above).

InDesign identifies the glyphs as “liga” (which they are, mostly; “liga” and “rlig” tables of the OT spec), together with their correct constituents, so as far as recognition goes, no issue. The space ($0020) character is a dot, which is what you can see above, just too many of them — under the syllable should be no extra dots, particularly since two of the diacritics used for marking various diphthongs are also either one or two dots respectively, creating confusion. Notepad works with the ligas and adds no extra dots/spaces, but obviously nothing that you can make anything of publication quality. WordPad cannot handle it, it writes no ligas but individual disconnected glyphs. Word 2010, by setting it to use ligatures, will do just a fine job, both liga as well as kerning-wise. QXP9 doesn't put dots under the syllables, but doesn't draw the one belonging to the “Space” char either, so no good.

What's written there is just “kaa a”, not intended to mean anything, merely used to illustrate the issue.

How further?