ligatures on windows
December 10, 2005 3:55 PM Subscribe
automatic ligatures on windows? i guess indesign does it, but i'm hoping you know of an openoffice plugin or another solution about the same price as openoffice.
Any editor with unicode supports them ...
if you type the unicode ligature characters directly. English has so few, so it is pretty easy to have them mapped to chords or what-have-you.
ij, fi, fl, ffi, ffl, ff, st
posted by clord at 6:17 PM on December 10, 2005
if you type the unicode ligature characters directly. English has so few, so it is pretty easy to have them mapped to chords or what-have-you.
ij, fi, fl, ffi, ffl, ff, st
posted by clord at 6:17 PM on December 10, 2005
Graphite looks promising; there are binaries of OpenOffice 2.0 using Graphite for text rendering, and this implies that it supports ligatures. I haven't used it and have no idea how it's implemented in the interface.
My two cents: if you're doing something professional and complex enough to require that you to use ligatures correctly, trying to do it in OpenOffice will cause you a world of pain. OO sucks as a DTP platform, moreso even than MS Word. Pirate InDesign or something similar if you can't afford it.
posted by IshmaelGraves at 7:47 PM on December 10, 2005
My two cents: if you're doing something professional and complex enough to require that you to use ligatures correctly, trying to do it in OpenOffice will cause you a world of pain. OO sucks as a DTP platform, moreso even than MS Word. Pirate InDesign or something similar if you can't afford it.
posted by IshmaelGraves at 7:47 PM on December 10, 2005
It seems to me that the easiest way to get Word to use ligatures would be to either use AutoCorrect or to write a search and replace macro keyed to the particular letter combinations (for after the fact).
One point of clarification: there's really no such thing as "automatic" ligatures -- each ligatures is a separate characters built into the typeface by its designer, and many faces don't have them (or only have them in the "expert" or "extented" versions). So to begin with you'd need to make sure that the typeface you're using does indeed have the ligatures you want.
Even InDesign will only insert ligatures, it doesn't create them. I'm not aware of any software that will fake ligatures, but even so I wouldn't suggest using it, since that sort of manipulation usually leads to ugly results.
posted by camcgee at 8:17 PM on December 10, 2005
One point of clarification: there's really no such thing as "automatic" ligatures -- each ligatures is a separate characters built into the typeface by its designer, and many faces don't have them (or only have them in the "expert" or "extented" versions). So to begin with you'd need to make sure that the typeface you're using does indeed have the ligatures you want.
Even InDesign will only insert ligatures, it doesn't create them. I'm not aware of any software that will fake ligatures, but even so I wouldn't suggest using it, since that sort of manipulation usually leads to ugly results.
posted by camcgee at 8:17 PM on December 10, 2005
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 4:34 PM on December 10, 2005