[XeTeX] Accessing ligatures from FontForge

[Meho R.]

On 23.02.2011 12:43, David Perry wrote:
> John,
>
> I don't know if FontForge uses the same syntax as Adobe's FDK (also
> used in FontLab), but I think it might.  Here's how I do <liga> in
> FontLab. (In FL if you don't specify a script and language it applies
> Latin script and the default language, which might be different in
> FontForge.)
>
> feature liga { # Standard Ligatures
>  # Latin
>     sub f f i by f_f_i;
>     sub f f l by f_f_l;
>     sub f i by fi;
>     sub f j by f_j;
>     sub f l by fl;
>     sub f f by f_f;
> } liga;
>
> The order of the ligatures is important; by putting the long ones
> (ffi, ffl) before the shorter ones you make sure that the long ones
> get processed correctly.  Ligatures are normally named by putting an
> underscore between the components, but fl and fi are an exception in
> fonts that follow the Adobe naming conventions -- which you are not
> required to do, of course.
>
> There are indeed many fonts out there that have the ligatures in the
> codepoints FB00 - FB04.  You may get better PDF searchability if you
> don't use any Unicode values, though.  But using them will not cause a
> <liga> feature to fail if it is otherwise set up correctly.
>
> David
>
Hi David

Thanks a lot for the remark about avoiding Unicode values for better
searchability. It works.