[XeTeX] Accessing ligatures from FontForge

David Perry hospes.primus at verizon.net
Wed Feb 23 01:04:27 CET 2011


John,

Using the OT <liga> feature is definitely the way to go.  Standard 
ligatures (<liga>) are on by default in XeTeX and if you set up the 
feature right it should just work.  Accessing ligatures through the PUA 
codepoints is NOT a good idea (the fact that they even have PUA values 
is a holdover from the dark ages of Unicode--all the characters in the 
Alphabetic Presentation Forms range should not be used).

If your OT features don't work, try in an application outside of XeTeX. 
  I recently added OT features to a font and assumed that I had messed 
up because they wouldn't work in XeTeX.  When I was finally able to test 
elsewhere the font turned out to be fine (I still haven't sorted out why 
the behavior is so bizarre in XeTeX--hopefully this won't happen to you).

David

On 2/22/2011 5:36 PM, John Was wrote:
> Hello
> Forgive the puzzlement of a new recruit to FontForge (which is installed
> via Cygwin on a Windows XP machine). And apologies if this isn't the
> right forum - though frequent discussion of font-related issues here
> gives me hope.
> I edited a font which had just the fi and fl ligatures (in their true
> Unicode positions at FB01 and FB02) and I managed to create tolerable
> versions of the other three standard ligatures (ff, ffi, ffl). Using
> FontForge I have added these in the slots FB00, FB03, and FB04. But
> "mapping=tex-text" in the font call (in plain XeTeX) doesn't access any
> of them, neither the two that were there already nor the three that I
> created; however, the standard ` ' `` and '' for opening and closing
> quotations do work so the mapping call is basically functioning as
> normal. The glyphs are accessible to TeX if I give them manually as
> \char"FB00 etc. but I obviously would like to have them delivered
> automatically as usual.
> I have tinkered with various FontForge menus and had hoped that adding
> 'liga' to the GSUB window would be sufficient, but there is clearly
> something I am not doing right. Can anyone advise?
> Many thanks
> John
>
>
>
>
>
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