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• • June 4, 2015 at 3:11 am #75810
    Andy Mcgroarty

    Member

    Hi there

    I know that in Microsoft Word that you can turn on all possible Ligatures in a document, but i wondered if that is possible in ID? I do have ligatures enabled in the character window, but it doesn’t seem to enable the ornate ligatures.

    For example, i am using FF Tisa Pro which has ligatures for ch/ck/ct, but they don’t appear normally. Now i know that i can just use the glyphs window to insert them, but on a large amount of text this would be pretty tedious. Is there a way that i can enable all of the available ligatures to be inserted and then pick and choose what i would like to keep afterwards?

    Thanks and best wishes.

  • June 4, 2015 at 9:19 am #75828
    Dwayne Harris

    Member

    So far as I know, InDesign doesn’t give you true ligatures. It just makes them appear as ligatures. True ligatures are a single character, the ligatures that InDesign makes are two characters. InDesign just makes them look like ligatures. And some combinations InDesign either doesn’t recognize or doesn’t do.

    For true ligatures, you’d have to do search and replaces.

    And I’m not sure if it’s still true or not so far as InDesign, but back in the Quark days, true ligatures (the keystroke) would not come through if the file was opened on a PC (we used Macs).

    So far as the appearance of ligatures, I remember we had one client who was fine with how they appeared, but when using Minion Pro (I think), they did not want the “Th” ligature. So we had to do a search and replace and uncheck the ligature for that combination. We used a character style for that.

  • June 5, 2015 at 1:22 am #75841
    Chris Thompson

    Member

    I was under the impression that the use of ligatures was font-dependent. i.e. if the font contains a pre-made ligature for a particular combination of letters, InDesign will use it. If not, it won’t attempt to “artificially” make them appear as a ligature.

    Testing with CS6, and using ffi with different fonts in the same text box, I get:
    Arial: no letters join, the i still has its dot
    Minion Pro: all join, and the dot of the i disappears
    Arno Pro: all join, and the dot of the i disappears
    Myriad Pro: all join, and the dot of the i disappears
    Times: the first f is separate, but the second f joins on to the i, and the dot of the i disappears

    So I’d conclude that my Arial doesn’t contain any ligatures, the three “Pro” fonts do contain a wide selection, and Times only a limited selection.

    Looking through the InDesign glyphs panel for each font, if there is a pre-made ligature, it appears with an OpenType annotation if you hover the mouse over: “Standard Ligatures (liga)”

    In pre-Unicode, pre-OpenType days, there were code points in some character sets for the fi and fl ligatures, e.g. 222 and 223 for MacRoman.

    I’m open to correction!
    Chris.

  • June 5, 2015 at 2:19 am #75842
    Chris Thompson

    Member

    (Later, after editing opportunity disappeared)
    … and the MacRoman code points thing would account for Dwayne’s experience in Quark days between Mac/PC, as the Windows fonts wouldn’t contain the code point ligatures at all.

  • June 5, 2015 at 3:21 am #75844
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    No, you definitely do not need to do find/change to get ligatures in InDesign, but you do need the right fonts. If the font has the right intelligence built in (and most OpenType fonts do), then InDesign does all the swapping on the fly.

    It sounds like you’re looking for the Discretionary Ligatures feature, which will replace things like “ct”. You can find that in the OpenType menu, inside the Control panel menu (or the Character panel menu).

    See: https://creativepro.com/typetalk-standard-vs-discretionary-ligatures/

  • June 5, 2015 at 3:31 am #75846
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    InDesign does use ‘true’ ligatures – of course only when they are provided in the font to begin with, and it also has to ‘know’ that they are there (i.e., the ligatures are properly indicated with one of the OpenType features).

    Your test with Times shows that this is most likely not a proper OpenType font and so it doesn’t contain any other ligatures than “fi” and “fl”. These two are special in that they pre-date OpenType; they are ‘normal’ characters, but InDesign is smart enough to find and use them anyway.

    The reason that Dwayne believes that InDesign fakes ligatures: “… two characters. InDesign just makes them look like ligatures …” is also because InDesign is way, way smarter than your Average DTP software. It scans regular text strings for combinations that can be replaced with ligatures, and when it finds any, it does not change the text but only the display. This is why you can search for a single ‘f’ and it finds this even when in a ligature, and why you can place the cursor ‘between’ two characters ‘inside’ a ligature and type a single letter which seemingly automatically ‘discards’ it.

    … Back to the original question.

    > For example, I am using FF Tisa Pro which has ligatures for ch/ck/ct, but they don’t appear normally.

    .. which is actually a good thing :) The common ligatures “fi” and “fl”, and in some fonts combo’s such as “ff”, “ffi”, “fj”, “fk”, “ft”, “fh”, and “Th”, are designed to prevent optical clashes between the overhanging part of the “f” and the next character. Some fonts don’t need a ligature because its design makes it unnecessary; then again, they still may contain a design for the standard ligatures because a text file may contain these character codes.

    The design for the ligatures you want is beyond this common use, and so they have an OpenType feature of their own: “Discretionary Ligatures”. As with all OpenType features, the character designs must be in the font and the correct OpenType feature must have been inserted as well, for InDesign to be able to use it.

    This seems to work for FF Tisa Pro: see https://myfonts.us/td-M6bEf4; I ticked the box “Discretionary ligatures” in the Typographic Variant settings, and lo, it contains both ‘ct’ and ‘st’.

  • June 5, 2015 at 3:56 am #75847
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    Dwayne: the ultimate proof that InDesign does use True Ligatures, straight out of the font, is because we can make them :)

    https://www.indiscripts.com/post/2015/05/indyfont-quick-demo-add-a-percent-off-ligature

    The ‘name’ of that single glyph is percent_O_F_F, and this is enough for InDesign to recognize and use it as a ligature. So the text string %OFF will be replaced with this one glyph. In addition, a good PDF reader such as Acrobat Pro is smart enough to recognize the name of that character as a ‘ligature name’, and so if you copy the text out of the PDF you get the original text back again.

  • June 5, 2015 at 4:30 am #75850
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    I was going to say something, but I’m glad I didn’t show my ignorance here.. I’ve learned a lot from that Jongware and David, thanks!

  • June 5, 2015 at 5:52 am #75853
    Andy Mcgroarty

    Member

    Perfect! Thank you so much David and Jongware! The Discretionary Ligatures feature was what i was looking for! And this is a very insightful discussion. Incidentally the font i was using FF Tisa Pro the ligature for Th seems to be classified as a discretionary ligature and isn’t automatically replaced when you have ‘ligatures enable.

    Thanks again, i love this place! No secrets here ;-)

  • June 5, 2015 at 7:40 am #75855
    Dwayne Harris

    Member

    Thanks for the explanations David, and Jongware. And I learned something new about the discretionary ligature thing. In the past, for those discretionary ligatures I was doing search and replaces.

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