Keystrokes for ffi, ffl, ff ligatures in OSX?

December 10, 2004 6:24 PM

[Typography-filter] Keystrokes for ffi, ffl, ff ligatures. Adobe Garamond Pro. OSX. How? How? How? Ideally I'd love to hear about utilities like PopChar, but right now I'd rather just eat the fish.
posted by Jeff Howard to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

scroll down here to ligatures and see if those work: they're shift/option/5 and 6
posted by amberglow at 7:33 PM on December 10, 2004 [1 favorite]

Adobe's "Pro" fonts are OpenType, so you have to make sure that the application that you're working with supports that technology. That shouldn't be a problem as long as you're using something released in the last couple of years. The gotcha here is that in most applications if you want all the cool characters you'll probably have to go to the Character Palette (Apple Menu > System Preferences > International > Input Menu, then check the "Character Palette" and "Show input menu in menu bar" options) and then locate the character you need and double-click it to insert it into your text.

What that means is that you don't get keyboard shortcuts for all of your ligatures. The upside is that there's a lot more cool stuff in these fonts.
posted by glyphlet at 8:00 PM on December 10, 2004

Response by poster: Thanks glyphlet, you made me realize that I had the wrong font selected. What I really wanted was Adobe Garamond Expert, not Pro. I was too caught in the details of the keystrokes to notice.

If anyone's searching for this in the future, here are the keystrokes.

Adobe Garamond Expert
ffi, shift-y
ffl, shift-z
ff, shift-v
fi, shift-w
fl, shift-x

Although amberglow is right about option-shift five and six for most fonts, in the expert version of Garamond, the fi and fl ligatures are only as above.
posted by Jeff Howard at 8:23 PM on December 10, 2004 [1 favorite]

ahh
posted by amberglow at 8:33 PM on December 10, 2004

If possible, use an OpenType font and an application that uses ATSUI (Apple Type Services for Unicode Imaging). Then you don't have to worry about what to type to get the ligatures -- the OS will figure out what characters you need. For fun, open TextEdit, set it to 72 point Zapfino, and type "Zapfino," noticing how the type changes when you have typed "Zapf" and how it changes again when you've typed "Zapfino." That "Zapfino" is a hell of a ligature!
posted by kindall at 8:52 PM on December 10, 2004

Then, for bonus points, note how most apps don't handle that Zapfino glyph properly! TextEdit cuts off the swash at the bottom of the f, unless you put some more text underneath it...
posted by xil at 9:08 PM on December 10, 2004

Response by poster: I don't like the idea of OpenType figuring out what I want. I know when I want an fi ligature and when I want an f-dotless i combo... Maybe the software knows too and maybe it doesn't, but I feel weird trusting it.
posted by Jeff Howard at 9:57 PM on December 10, 2004

Response by poster: The Zapfino thing _is pretty cool though...
posted by Jeff Howard at 10:03 PM on December 10, 2004

Of course, if you use Indesign CS in tandem with your opentype pro fonts, you've got it made: you can access every single character through the glyphs palette, as well as specifying classes of characters, or portions of the typeface, in the character palette (i.e, proportional oldstyle numerals vs. tabular figures, alternates and ligatures, small caps, ordinals, etc.). I really don't think that any single product has done more to accomodate typesetting on the Mac; the combination of IDCS and OTF pro fonts has really changed my entire way of working - for the better - and has sped up my work AND increased the quality of what I'm setting! And for the first time I feel confident setting work digitally for letterpress - no more going blind trying to distribute metal back into the California case.
posted by luriete at 12:32 AM on December 11, 2004