Hi Wolfgang, All, First I think it better if ligatures should be off as a default. Now, to my actual question. Is there a way in ConText to selectively true certain ligatures on/ff. for example fl could be on, but fi off. I know that I can set up the the editor to do it, or use unicode directly, but would prefer ConText to do the work. regards Keith. Am 24.04.2013 um 10:51 schrieb Wolfgang Schuster :

Am 24.04.2013 um 10:39 schrieb H. Özoguz :

...

Hi,

\usemodule[simplefonts] \setmainfont[AGaramondPro] \starttext Amficool \stoptext

gives an "i" without dot, see attachment. And the letters "i" and "f" are curiously bonded.

The second attachment shows the same word written in MS-Word, again with Adobe Garamond Pro, without this curiosity. Where this comes from and how to fix?

This is a ligature [1], you can disable ligatures when you add

\definefontfeature[default][default][liga=no]

before \setmainfont.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typographic_ligature

Wolfgang

Hi Thomas, Am 25.04.2013 um 08:56 schrieb Thomas A. Schmitz :

On 04/25/2013 08:20 AM, Keith J. Schultz wrote:

...

First I think it better if ligatures should be off as a default.

Then you should not be using any form of TeX. ligatures have been part of TeX since its invention (TeXbook, p. 4), and they have been part of fine typesetting since Gutenberg. It's a sad consequence of the advent of abominations like Microsoft Word that people consider them superfluous. I use XeLaTeX and ConText for it control. I have not touched Word in decades, if possible or any other WYSIWYG- system! That being said, take a look at the books printed in this day and age. You will find that the use ligatures are not that common. For me the fi-ligature, is estranging, as well as other while reading. Others I find very pleasing. I do not want to discuss esthetics. I was just expressing my opinion. If the engross of ConText users want ligatures as default that is fine with me. On the other side, I believe, ligatures of off by default in LaTeX, et al. or at least are feature is set when the font is loaded.

...

Now, to my actual question. Is there a way in ConText to selectively true certain ligatures on/ff. for example fl could be on, but fi off.

I know that I can set up the the editor to do it, or use unicode directly, but would prefer ConText to do the work.

Opentype fonts put ligatures into certain groups, so turning fi off while keeping fl is a bit difficult. I think you could use a font goodies file and put a zero-width empty space between f and i. There's a file demo.lfg in the standalone distribution which might be of help.

Thanx, for the pointer! Will look into it. regards Keith.

On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 09:41:15AM +0200, Keith J. Schultz wrote:

On the other side, I believe, ligatures of off by default in LaTeX, et al. or at least are feature is set when the font is loaded.

So you neither use LaTeX nor ConTeXt?

On 4/26/2013 2:12 PM, Keith J. Schultz wrote:

Hi Khaled,

When I used LaTeX last if I had fi in my text that is how it came out! Using ConTeXt I noticed that fi becomes a ligature, did not like, but it was not that important.

also keep in mind that ligatures are language dependent (if the font language is set at all) Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | voip: 087 875 68 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------

Hi Khaled, to be honest I never noticed them when I was using LaTeX. It might have been the fonts. I can live with them being on as a default in ConTeXt and know now how to turn them off. regards Keith. Am 26.04.2013 um 20:27 schrieb Khaled Hosny :

I don’t know what LaTeX you were using, but LaTeX does not and will not disable ligatures by default (there isn’t even a way in original TeX to disable ligatures globally, short of editing TFM files).

Regards, Khaled

On 4/26/2013 11:48 PM, Mojca Miklavec wrote:

On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 9:57 PM, Keith J. Schultz wrote:

...

to be honest I never noticed them when I was using LaTeX. It might have been the fonts.

Someone had to show me the first ligature years ago and when he did that, I had to check every single book and document I had at hand to check if ligatures were really commonly used. I simply couldn't believe my eyes and the fact that it took me some 15 years of literacy and a couple of years of using TeX without ever noticing any ligature anywhere.

ha, and then you started recognizing tex docs by abundant use of frames around tables and, emdashes, funny logos with lowered and raised characters, and ... btw, i have something similar with metapost: once you notice how precise mp is, you also notice how imprecise most other vector graphics are

I consider this (the fact that one doesn't notice it) part of a good design. It's similar with kerning: one doesn't notice it until/unless it's bad. It's similar in the kitchen also. One doesn't notice that

but i assume, as you were involved in lucida ot, that you know that this font has no kerns .. (i remember seeing a monotype type one times that was advertized as being very good because it had 4000+ kerning pairs .. on one of those expensive sun-workstation typesetting systems that in the meantime disappeared) (already for years i wonder that when printing from firefox etc it looks like the kerns are put on the wrong side of the glyphs)

there is salt in food unless there's too little or too much of it present.

the opposite is true for hz and protrusion ... it takes a while to believe that tex can do a bad job when these are applied extremely and when applied less extreme one doesn't notice so i find myself never using it there's some similarity is discussions about typography and high end audio (esp dacs and amps) ... one can go to real extremes but at some point wishful thinking enters the equation honestly ... we cannot guarantee that texies will recognize 100% of the texts typeset by tex, given that one uses a non-lm font and non-standard layout setup or: when you see a tex typeset in lm and with some standard latex style that has been around for decades, it can trigger an 'ah it looks good' felling simply because one *knows* it has been done by tex nowadays when i read some novel with excessive expansion, inter character spacing and whatever, i always doubt it has been done by a badly configured in-design or equally bad configured tex

Mojca

PS: if you really hate the ligatures, you can try to help improve this "interesting" package to handle ligatures (it probably has the most potential in engines other than XeTeX/LuaTeX because it's a bit more complicated to turn off the ligatures there): http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/serbian-lig The package defines commands for all the words from a dictionary which contain letters "fi", for example \def\profit{prof\kern 0.03em it\xspace} \def\Gadafi{Gadaf\kern 0.03em i\xspace} % \stopsarcasm

whow .. it probably dates from the time before we had scripting languages that could parse text, although in that time tex's hash table/string space was too small to accomodate dictionaries pdftex has \noligs -) ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | voip: 087 875 68 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------

On Apr 27, 2013, at 12:16 AM, Hans Hagen wrote:

...

Someone had to show me the first ligature years ago and when he did that, I had to check every single book and document I had at hand to check if ligatures were really commonly used. I simply couldn't believe my eyes and the fact that it took me some 15 years of literacy and a couple of years of using TeX without ever noticing any ligature anywhere.

ha, and then you started recognizing tex docs by abundant use of frames around tables and, emdashes, funny logos with lowered and raised characters, and ...

btw, i have something similar with metapost: once you notice how precise mp is, you also notice how imprecise most other vector graphics are

...

I consider this (the fact that one doesn't notice it) part of a good design. It's similar with kerning: one doesn't notice it until/unless it's bad. It's similar in the kitchen also. One doesn't notice that

but i assume, as you were involved in lucida ot, that you know that this font has no kerns ..

(i remember seeing a monotype type one times that was advertized as being very good because it had 4000+ kerning pairs .. on one of those expensive sun-workstation typesetting systems that in the meantime disappeared)

(already for years i wonder that when printing from firefox etc it looks like the kerns are put on the wrong side of the glyphs)

Here's a nice one: http://xkcd.com/1015/ I feel that's what TeX does to you... Thomas

On 04/26/2013 09:41 AM, Keith J. Schultz wrote:

I use XeLaTeX and ConText for it control. I have not touched Word in decades, if possible or any other WYSIWYG- system! That being said, take a look at the books printed in this day and age. You will find that the use ligatures are not that common. For me the fi-ligature, is estranging, as well as other while reading. Others I find very pleasing. I do not want to discuss esthetics. I was just expressing my opinion. If the engross of ConText users want ligatures as default that is fine with me. On the other side, I believe, ligatures of off by default in LaTeX, et al. or at least are feature is set when the font is loaded.

Hi Keith, if you look at the books of decent publishers, you will see that most of them still use ligatures (most American university presses, Oxford and Cambridge, German publishers such as Reclam etc.) However, many smaller publishers don't give a rat's ass about esthetics, and that's where Word comes into play: they have their authors deliver their manuscripts as Word files and simply typeset from that, more often than not by employing some underpaid and untrained "contractors" in India. Cuts costs and makes authors do all the work that publishers used to do in the olden days... Taking this as the norm is not a good idea. As to LaTeX: you're wrong, LaTeX is part of the TeX family as is ConTeXt and has ligatures. If you set up your fonts correctly in XeLaTeX, you get them. Thomas

On 04/26/2013 10:05 PM, Keith J. Schultz wrote:

I never said that they do not have ligatures. I never said XeLaTeX does not have the ability to use them I have read the fontspec manual!

You wrote:

On the other side, I believe, ligatures of off by default in LaTeX

which is wrong. That's not an opinion, it's a fact.

What I do not understand is why you rant to me about Words inabilities! I never mentioned before you did!!

Then read my message again. It is not a "rant." It points out that Word is the reason why some people consider ligatures unusual.

It is a shame that when one states an opinion that others dislike or do not agree with one is pushed into a corner which had absolutely nothing to do with one post.

You were the one who has been using ConTeXt for a couple of days and declares

First I think it better if ligatures should be off as a default.

As a rule, it is considered good style to gain some knowledge before you give such general advice.

For me this discussion has gone far enough.

Quite so. The words "I was wrong" seem to be a bit difficult for some people. Thomas

thinking of it: one reason why a general purpose word processor used by people with no idea about things like ligatures, is that ligatures are language dependent

I don't think that's necessary relevant: the only example I can think of language-dependent ligatures is fi and ffi for Turkish and other languages that use the dotless i (ı, U+0131), because removing the dot on the i would be confusing in that case; but that's really all. All other ligatures depend on the font. Many Adobe-produced fonts have a special ligatures for Turkish and some other languages using ı, I suspect because Adobe Font Development Kit for OpenType has a provision for them. Arthur

The Germans do not like ligatures across compound words, and that is much harder to do in an automated way (not in fonts themselves at least).

That's a good point, but it's a slightly different issue from prohibiting some ligatures altogether: in German ligatures should be disabled depending on context, and that applies to all ligatures that may be present in the font; while in Turkish some specific ligatures should never occur at all, but the others are free to go. While we're on the subject, and since Thomas mentioned Reclam, I seem to remember that dtv, another paperback publisher, uses a font with the relatively rare ligature ft; I don't have any book by them handy at the moment, but I assume that they do apply the same rule as with the other ligatures and don't set them across compounds. That's what I meant by font-dependent ligatures; maybe I should have written typeface rather than font. Clearly you don't want to implement the prohibition of ligatures across compounds at the font level. Arthur (but I have the TeXbook on my way to BachoTeX. It does use ligatures)

Greetings, Keith, Thomas, and all, On Fri, 26 Apr 2013 10:43:59 -0600, Thomas A. Schmitz wrote:

if you look at the books of decent publishers, you will see that most of them still use ligatures (most American university presses, Oxford and Cambridge, German publishers such as Reclam etc.) However, many smaller publishers don't give a rat's ass about esthetics, and that's where Word comes into play: they have their authors deliver their manuscripts as Word files and simply typeset from that, more often than not by employing some underpaid and untrained "contractors" in India. Cuts costs and makes authors do all the work that publishers used to do in the olden days... Taking this as the norm is not a good idea.

The situation Thomas is describing is analogous to what happened 40 years ago: When metal-based typesetting started to die out, what came after was atrocious but ubiquitous. And that's _exactly_ why Knuth invented TeX! As a general rule: High-quality typesetting with good fonts and the ligatures off is like pouring fine wine into a plastic cup. Best wishes Idris -- Professor Idris Samawi Hamid Department of Philosophy Colorado State University Fort Collins, CO 80523

Am 24.04.2013 um 11:00 schrieb Peter Münster :

On Wed, Apr 24 2013, H. Özoguz wrote:

...

The second attachment shows the same word written in MS-Word, again with Adobe Garamond Pro, without this curiosity.

Perhaps a bug in M$-Word...? ;)

Microsoft added support for opentype ligatures in Word 2010 you have to enable it in the options. http://chris.dziemborowicz.com/blog/2009/05/17/how-to-enable-opentype-ligatu... Wolfgang