[XeTeX] How to use ligatures for TTF fonts?

[Adam Twardoch]

Jonathan Kew wrote:
> What OS version are you using, and what version of Times New Roman is  
> this? Any fairly recent version Windows version of TNR should include  
> the OpenType tables that support these ligatures, 

Jonathan,

The Microsoft core fonts (Arial, Times New Roman, Courier New, Tahoma
etc.) only contain OpenType Layout code for complex scripts. So there is
ligature code for lam+alif in Times New Roman but not for f+i.

This has been done to prevent documents from reflowing when users use
different Windows versions -- something that has been always a very high
priority with corporate users. For the same reason, Verdana has no
kerning in the Italic, Bold and Bold Italic styles (so it has kerning
only in the Regular style) -- the versions that included in Internet
Explorer 4.0 shipped that way *by mistake*, and this has never been
corrected. This was a conscious choice to keep this bug. When Microsoft
added more glyphs to the core fonts over the years, or when they
improved the design of some diacritics in Arial, Tahoma and Times New
Roman for Windows Vista, they always took extra care not to change the
metrics.

The new Microsoft ClearType fonts (Constantia, Cambria, Corbel, Calibri,
Candara, Consolas) of course do contain OpenType Layout code for Latin,
Cyrillic and Greek.

Best,
Adam

-- 

Adam Twardoch
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