affinity publisher Recycling poem

[William Overington]

Although the font has fifteen long s ligatures it does not have ligature glyphs for a long s followed by any of  'a', 'c', 'e', 'o', and 'u'.

However, I am hoping to be able to use kerning within Affinity Publisher so as to improve the look of such sequences, some of which appear in the image.

Yet I need to work out how much kerning to use, perhaps using the long s i ligature as a guide.

As the font is SIL licensed it may be possible to produce a derivate font adding those extra ligatures.

I wonder if, and if so, how, one could produce a long s swash 'e' glyph that gets used at the end of a word or at the end of a line. 

William

 

[Alfred]

1 hour ago, Ali said:

I don't know why the use of the long 's' makes me want to read the entire poem with a lisp ... 😏

LOL, yes! It reminds me of the old cookery thing (probably from Peg Bracken) about “feafoning falt”.

[Alfred]

2 minutes ago, William Overington said:

As the font is SIL licensed it may be possible to produce a derivate font adding those extra ligatures.

As the font is released under the SIL OFL, it is (legally) possible to produce a derivative font. No ‘may be’ about it.

[Alfred]

13 hours ago, William Overington said:

I can't find anything about final forms.

You must have found something about final forms in order to change the appearance of most of the word-final ‘e’ characters.

[William Overington]

1 minute ago, Alfred said:

You must have found something about final forms in order to change the appearance of most of the word-final ‘e’ characters.

No, I just added a hexadecimal 200B ZERO WIDTH SPACE after each swash 'e' that was not at the end of a line, so each 'e' was no longer at the end of a word as far as the software was concerned. Red spelling mistake underlining in the display in Affinity Publisher, but no matter.

William

 

[Alfred]

43 minutes ago, Alfred said:

You must have found something about final forms in order to change the appearance of most of the word-final ‘e’ characters.

 

22 minutes ago, William Overington said:

No, I just added a hexadecimal 200B ZERO WIDTH SPACE after each swash 'e' that was not at the end of a line, so each 'e' was no longer at the end of a word as far as the software was concerned.

Ah, my apologies! You did explain that, but I obviously forgot.

Look at the OpenType section where you enabled Discretionary Ligatures (for sequences like ‘sk’) and Historical Forms (for the long ess). You should find checkboxes there for Initial Forms and Final Forms.

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, William Overington said:

Although the font has fifteen long s ligatures it does not have ligature glyphs for a long s followed by any of  'a', 'c', 'e', 'o', and 'u'.

I believe that, traditionally, the long s is used in only a limited number of locations within a word, and it would never occur before those letters. Therefore no ligature is needed.

[William Overington]

31 minutes ago, Alfred said:

Look at the OpenType section where you enabled Discretionary Ligatures (for sequences like ‘sk’) and Historical Forms (for the long ess). You should find checkboxes there for Initial Forms and Final Forms.

Well I can't find it.

I am still running version 1.9.0.932, is what you refer to in a later version? I have not updated because I read reports of people having problems and I alsp I have had not used Affinity Publisher for a while.

Also, it might be somethimg not set up as an option somewhere. I was actually wondering whether Affinity Publisher has a Find and Replace feature like PagePlus as I could not find it and then found that it is off by default!

So could ypu possible detail it explicitly please as I simply cannot find it.

William

 

[William Overington]

3 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

I believe that, traditionally, the long s is used in only a limited number of locations within a word, and it would never occur before those letters. Therefore no ligature is needed.

I had not heard of that before in English. I know that in German there is a difference over the word Wachstube, which can either be Wachs tube or Wach stube, 

https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/430349/provoke-or-avoid-ligatures-in-micro-typography

William

 

[Alfred]

22 minutes ago, William Overington said:

as I simply cannot find it

Please post a screenshot of the Typography panel, showing its subsections expanded.

Edit: I’ve just found the following post which shows what I expect you to see:

 

Edited November 27, 2021 by Alfred
Added info

[Alfred]

19 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

I believe that, traditionally, the long s is used in only a limited number of locations within a word, and it would never occur before those letters. Therefore no ligature is needed.

 

4 minutes ago, William Overington said:

I had not heard of that before in English.

Me too neither! I only know about not using it before or after an eff.

[William Overington]

I have found this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s

Readers in the United Kingdom of a certain age may find this of particular interest. That was in regular use until early 1971, I never knew the reason until now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s#Shilling_mark

William

 

[William Overington]

30 minutes ago, Alfred said:

Please post a screenshot of the Typography panel, showing its subsections expanded.

Edit: I’ve just found the following post which shows what I expect you to see:

 

Referring to that illustration, I don't have that Positional Alternates section, even on the .afpub file of the first image in this thread.

William

[Alfred]

13 minutes ago, William Overington said:

I never knew the reason until now

Neither did I! I had always assumed that the oblique stroke was simply a dividing line to separate the shillings from the pence.

I’m a little wary of relying on that particular snippet, given that no source is cited.

[Alfred]

3 minutes ago, William Overington said:

Referring to that illustration, I don't have that Positional Alternates section, even on the .afpub file of the first image in this thread.

What about Affinity Designer?

[William Overington]

17 minutes ago, Alfred said:

What about Affinity Designer?

No.

But what one gets depends on the font. For example, different for Goudita SF.

As you mentioned a different source for the font, maybe it is not supported in the version of the font that I have got.

If I open the font in FontCreator, for what should I look?

The file has

Version 1.00 March 15, 2019, initial release

William

 

[Alfred]

2 hours ago, William Overington said:

The file has

Version 1.00 March 15, 2019, initial release

2019 is much too old for the ‘initial release’ of a typeface that’s been around for at least a decade! What’s the file size?

[AdamStanislav]

8 hours ago, William Overington said:

I found that not only does the font support the long s character, it also includes fifteen long s ligatures.

I am surprised it does not kern the long s followed by the o in some. It looks more like s ome.

[William Overington]

5 hours ago, Alfred said:

2019 is much too old for the ‘initial release’ of a typeface that’s been around for at least a decade! What’s the file size?

552 kilobytes.

The filename is EBGaramond-Italic.ttf with .ttf as the file name extension, which surprised me as it is an OpenType font. 

William

 

[Alfred]

12 hours ago, William Overington said:

552 kilobytes.

I’ve just redownloaded EB Garamond from both Font Squirrel and Google Fonts. The Google Fonts versions have a TTF extension and are all around 500 KB, with the italic slightly less than that. The Font Squirrel family is structured differently, with two files where Google Fonts has only one (e.g. ‘EBGaramond08-Italic’ and ‘EBGaramond12-Italic’); these files are smaller, and their names have an OTF extension.

12 hours ago, William Overington said:

The filename is EBGaramond-Italic.ttf with .ttf as the file name extension, which surprised me as it is an OpenType font.

There are two principal kinds of OpenType fonts: the TrueType ones use quadratic Bézier curves and the CFF ones use cubic Bézier curves. OpenType fonts with a TTF extension should always be TrueType-based, but fonts with an OTF extension may be either kind.

[AdamStanislav]

22 hours ago, William Overington said:

.ttf as the file name extension, which surprised me as it is an OpenType font. 

It’s not unusual for an OpenType font to have that extension. OpenType evolved from TrueType, so as the biologists say, we still are what we have evolved from, not just humans but apes, and mammals, and animals, etc. In that way an OpenType font technically still is a TrueType font, albeit it evolved.