John Jordan wrote: > The absolute best way to do this, given the state of today's > computers and software, is the way Adobe implemented it in > InDesign. > ...
> Adobe solved both these problems by holding the text internally > without ligatures. Thus, the spell checker was not confused and > other applications received text they could handle. For screen > display and printing the alternate ligatures are used. I don't know InDesign but I guess that's similar to what we plan to implement. > Of course, this > works only with OpenType fonts that are properly coded and which > contain the ligature alternates. It does not work with the older fonts > where the ligatures are in a separate "expert set." We'll see about that :-) > The system works extremely well. In the currrent version of > InDesign there are several ligature options. You can turn on the f- > ligatures, you can turn on "discretionary" ligatures (ct, st, etc.), > and/or you can turn on swash alternates. Charwise, paragraphwise or documentwise? > I hope Scribus implements a similar scheme. I can't think of any > other way to do it. > And after the ligature issue is handled, could we have optical > kerning? :) Scribus currently relies on the kerning information in the font. We will add a manual kerning option soon. Adobe's optical kerning is patented AFAIK (don't we hate those patent issues?). I don't know about iKern (http://www.iginomarini.com/ikern.html). /Andreas
