[XeTeX] Accessing ligatures from FontForge

[David J. Perry]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Meho R." <mehor at gmx.com>
To: "Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms" <xetex at tug.org>
Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2011 9:27 AM
Subject: Re: [XeTeX] Accessing ligatures from FontForge

> Thanks for the link. However, even Adobe's OTF fonts have same problems
> when used with XeLaTeX regarding ligatures and searchability, so I don't
> think it is a naming convention issue.
Adobe used to give their small caps, ligatures, old style numerals and so 
forth PDF values.  In recent years they have stopped doing that.  So if you 
are testing with an older Adobe font, it may be giving the ligatures PDF 
values which, as you have seen, makes searching work poorly.

> Curiously, when OTF fonts are
> used with Scribus and ligatures are inserted manually, they are
> recognized in PDF and no searchability issue there.
Scribus, AFAIK, does not support any OT features that implement high-quality 
typography (ligatures, old style numerals, etc.).  So I'm not sure what's 
happening there.  Is it using PUA values??

>Also, when OTF fonts
> are converted to TTF, it seems searchability issue is gone with XeLaTeX
> too (at least seems like that for couple of fonts I just tested).
Now that's interesting.  Converting fonts should preserve all Unicode 
values, including PUA ones, but (depending on the software and settings 
used) might remove OT features.

David