[XeTeX] Accessing ligatures from FontForge

[Andy Lin]

I agree, it's not a good solution. I've seen it break small caps (so
\textsc{first} yields fiRST, where RST is small caps, but fi is the
lowercase ligature), and do other strange things. It is, however, a
relatively painless way to enable such ligatures in TrueType fonts or
OpenType fonts that don't have a liga feature for the roman alphabet
but have the glyph (Most Windows fonts from before Vista/7 are like
this).

On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 18:07, Jonathan Kew <jfkthame at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
> On 22 Feb 2011, at 22:55, Andy Lin wrote:
>
>> tex-text.map only provides for some punctuation marks. You can add
>> these lines to your tex-text.map file (or use it as a base and name it
>> something different, like tex-text-f.map). Semicolons are comment
>> characters. Below, only fi and fl ligatures are active.
>>
>> You'll need to run the file through teckitcompile.exe to generate the
>> .tec that XeTeX uses.
>>
>> ;U+0066 U+0066        <>      U+FB00  ; ff -> ff ligature
>> U+0066 U+0069 <>      U+FB01  ; fi -> fi ligature
>> U+0066 U+006C <>      U+FB02  ; fl -> fl ligature
>> ;U+0066 U+0066 U+0069 <>      U+FB03  ; ffi -> ffi ligature
>> ;U+0066 U+0066 U+006C <>      U+FB04  ; ffl -> ffl ligature
>>
>
> Although you _could_ do this, I wouldn't advise it. Much better to learn how to set up the ligatures you want as 'liga' substitutions in the OpenType font.
>
> JK
>
>
>> On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 17:36, John Was <john.was at ntlworld.com> 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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