Ligature On/Off as App Setting not each document

[Dennison]

Unfortunately ligatures don't work with Mac - longstanding problem since a previous Apple update.

It would save a lot of time if the default setting could be in the App Settings, with an override in each document Text setting.

At the moment, every TEXT FRAME in every document in AD has to have the Ligature turned off manually.  1400 drawings each with 4 text frames per drawing x every Beta update! = a lot of unnecessary work for a feature that does not work.

 

Thanks

[Old Bruce]

Text has ligatures, Text Frames do not have ligatures.

This (1400 drawings with 4 text frames per drawing) is a situation where Text Styles would be useful. Turn off the ligatures in the Paragraph Style and it is off.

I guess you could set up [No Style] to have them off by turning them off in the Character Panel and then saving that as the default for [No Style].

[MikeTO]

If you want to turn off ligatures, create a new document, turn off ligatures (Character > Typography > Standard Ligatures), and then choose Edit > Defaults > Save.

 

[Dennison]

Thanks Mike.

What would I do with the new document, when the problem persists in the existing document?

A new issue has arisen this afternoon.

Text in Text frame in AD exported as SVG and imported to AfPub V2. - see screenshot

Ligatures  AFPub is off.  Seems like in AD, Ligatures has to be turned off for each and every Text Frame, which I have done

Font is Arial - Bold - 10 pt

Does not occur with Arial Black

Duplicating the Text Frame that displays correctly and retyping the text creates the problem.

Copying and Pasting the text into Text app and copying and pasting that text into the AD file makes no difference (this method corrected earlier problems with fonts not displaying correctly in Japanese).

 

The workaround is avoid Arial - but I've just spend days changing the font in 100s of drawings in ELEVEN books after Apple withdrew Iowan Old Style, replacing that with an open source font PT Sans, only to have AFPub V2 - PDF export create new problems.  I was hoping and expecting a font like Arial to work without problems.

I'm posting this primarily as an alert to what seems like a problem; I'll have to use a workaround

 

[MikeTO]

51 minutes ago, Dennison said:

What would I do with the new document, when the problem persists in the existing document?

The new document is of no importance. I suggested:

- To turn off ligatures, create a new document, turn off ligatures (Character > Typography > Standard Ligatures), and then choose Edit > Defaults > Save

I suggested creating a new document only so that you didn't accidentally save your defaults with other text attributes in an existing document. Creating a new document, changing only the attributes you want to change, and then saving defaults is the best way to avoid accidents.

I tested it in AD 2.1 just now and it saved my defaults correctly. When I restarted AD and drew new text frames they no longer had ligatures on.

51 minutes ago, Dennison said:

Seems like in AD, Ligatures has to be turned off for each and every Text Frame, which I have done

That is incorrect. I tested it just now with the suggestion I provided above and ligatures was off for good. Every text frame I created had it off. Of course if you copy and paste text from another source it might have ligatures on. Or perhaps your text styles have ligatures set to on - you'll have to check all of your text styles for ligatures.

51 minutes ago, Dennison said:

Font is Arial - Bold - 10 pt

Does not occur with Arial Black

This is because Arial Black lacks the ligature glyph so Affinity can't covert the two characters to a ligature.

I really think you need to investigate your text styles. Or send me a copy of the file and I'll take a look.

Cheers

[kenmcd]

I do not understand the issue.
What does "LIP SEAL" have to do with ligatures?

Are you seeing other ligatures issues?

Is this another case of APub doing "standard" ligature character replacements - even when there are no OpenType ligatures, but the old Unicode legacy ligature characters are there?
Which is stupid and creates problems (like this).

Perhaps removing the old legacy ligature characters from the font may help.
Arial has these old legacy ligature characters: ff fi fl ffi ffl ſt st - and no OpenType liga
Arial Black has: fi fl - and no OpenType liga
PT Sans has: fi fl - and also has OpenType liga for these too

So is your Arial issue that APub is substituting the ligatures characters in the APub document, then including them in the exported SVG (probably incorrectly), and then when you import the SVG again it is messed-up?
(because the export is done wrong, or the import is done wrong, or both)

PT Sans can easily be modified to remove all the ligatures. (characters and OpenType code)
Then APub cannot screw it up.
What is the issue(s) with this font?

There are a lot of Arial substitute fonts which are FOSS and could be modified to work-around this ligature lunacy.

[Old Bruce]

20 hours ago, Dennison said:

Seems like in AD, Ligatures has to be turned off for each and every Text Frame, which I have done

Things like Ligatures are a Text attribute. Not a Text Frame attribute. Use Paragraph and Character Styles to turn off Ligatures.

[Dennison]

On 5/23/2023 at 1:00 PM, Old Bruce said:

Things like Ligatures are a Text attribute. Not a Text Frame attribute. Use Paragraph and Character Styles to turn off Ligatures.

Thanks for the clarification. This still means that Ligatures has to be turned off in each and every Text Frame.  Pity there is no Global setting for the document. Affinity + Apple = Ligatures do NOT work.

I'm sure there is a problem in Affinity.  If I duplicate a small Text Frame in Af Design with the Text ligatures turned OFF - STILL exports incorrectly.

Frame A = "Größe der Feder" (ligatures None) - Frame duplicated - same text (ligatures None) = exports  incorrectly. 

How can the SAME word with ligatures None for both still export incorrectly (SVG to import to AfPub) ? 

A duplicated Text Frame should surely behave in an identical way, but they do not.

[Dennison]

On 5/22/2023 at 5:34 PM, kenmcd said:

I do not understand the issue.
What does "LIP SEAL" have to do with ligatures?

Are you seeing other ligatures issues?

Is this another case of APub doing "standard" ligature character replacements - even when there are no OpenType ligatures, but the old Unicode legacy ligature characters are there?
Which is stupid and creates problems (like this).

Perhaps removing the old legacy ligature characters from the font may help.
Arial has these old legacy ligature characters: ff fi fl ffi ffl ſt st - and no OpenType liga
Arial Black has: fi fl - and no OpenType liga
PT Sans has: fi fl - and also has OpenType liga for these too

So is your Arial issue that APub is substituting the ligatures characters in the APub document, then including them in the exported SVG (probably incorrectly), and then when you import the SVG again it is messed-up?
(because the export is done wrong, or the import is done wrong, or both)

PT Sans can easily be modified to remove all the ligatures. (characters and OpenType code)
Then APub cannot screw it up.
What is the issue(s) with this font?

There are a lot of Arial substitute fonts which are FOSS and could be modified to work-around this ligature lunacy.

Ligature seems to go wrong with every font. I've had dozens of instances.

PT Sans has other problems between Apple-AfD and AFPub - characters replaced by boxes.  So I have replaced all instances in thousands of Text Frames in multiple books with Arial.  Now duplicating a Text Frame with the Arial text style set to Ligature None STILL exports incorrectly.  One text frame is correct, the duplicate exports incorrectly. How can that be? 

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, Dennison said:

This still means that Ligatures has to be turned off in each and every Text Frame. 

No, it means that you need to use Text Styles and turn them off there. Ideally you would have your Text Styles set up as the default styles are in Publisher, where everything inherits from a Base style, and you would just turn it off there and it would handle it for all the text in your document.

But if you're not using Text Styles, you could select all the text (which is easy for linked text frames) and adjust the setting in the Character panel.

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, Dennison said:

Now duplicating a Text Frame with the Arial text style set to Ligature None STILL exports incorrectly.  One text frame is correct, the duplicate exports incorrectly. How can that be? 

Please provide a sample .afpub document showing that, and probably we'll be able to tell you.

[Dennison]

All help gratefully received.

Here is the original AfDesign file 

+ abbreviated AfPub file

problem is on page 28

DE TWIN MLog May 29 ABBREV.afpub GER prop shaft taper copy.afdesign

[MikeTO]

Hi Dennison, we don't need the entire document, just the problem page. Here's a reduced document so you could delete your full one if you want to protect it from view.

DE TWIN MLog May 29 ABBREV.afpub

But we need the embedded SVG (28 GER prop shaft taper.svg) and also the AFDESIGN file used to create it, assuming it was drawn in Designer.

It's unclear to me what problem with ligatures is supposed to be evident in this file. If it's the fact that Größe der Nut is messed up with the Gr overlapping, that's because they have -500.1% kerning applied.

Both Größe der Nut and W Größe der Feder have standard ligatures on but neither has ligature characters in them.

[Dennison]

Yes the problem was the overlapping

Totally weird.

The text with the overlapping is a duplicate of the frame that does not have problem.

Kerning is set to Auto for my AfDesign file and the AfPub file.

Where has -500.1% come from?

 

The AfPub I uploaded was abbreviated

[MikeTO]

Could you upload the afdesign file? I can't replicate the issue with the embedded svg. If I edit the embedded object and duplicate the "Feder" text object, save the afpub and re-open it, there is no change. I'd like to try it with the afdesign file.

[Dennison]

I uploaded the AfDesign file a couple of hours ago

 

[walt.farrell]

I'm not sure if the problem is with generating the SVG, or with interpreting it when it's Opened later...

The .afdesign file looks fine to me, and there is no kerning specified between the G and r>

When I Export as an SVG, the generated code is this:

<g transform="matrix(0.833895,0,0,1,-4.4752,0.536409)">
                <g transform="matrix(7,0,0,7,126.369,105.195)">
                </g>
                <text x="60.109px" y="105.195px" style="font-family:'ArialMT', 'Arial', sans-serif;font-size:7px;">W L<tspan x="72.294px 74.238px " y="105.195px 105.195px "> G</tspan>röße der Feder</text>
            </g>

And when I Open the SVG in Designer, I get the -500.1 ‰ kerning between the G and r.

Edit: Firefox shows it correctly, so it's probably something wrong in the way Designer handles it when reading it.

[MikeTO]

Sorry, I missed the afdesign file the first time. I concur with Walt, there's nothing wrong with your afdesign file and this issue has nothing to do with ligatures or duplicating a text frame. The problem is with the tspan tags around " G" (space+G) in the exported SVG code which Affinity is interpreting as -500.1% kerning when you place the SVG.

The tspan tags are used to adjust the spacing of characters with kerning applied. The "L " (L+space) before the word Größe in Arial has an automatic kerning pair of -37.1%. If you zero this out the problem goes away, so that's your workaround for now, just zero out the kerning pair whenever you encounter this issue.

It's not specific to Arial, it will happen with any font with an automatic kerning pair for a character+space or with any manual kerning you apply to a character+space in any font. It won't happen with a kerning pair that doesn't involve a space such as AV or T.

For Serif, here's a test document.

L space.afdesign L space.svg

Left: Before export, Right: after export to SVG and placed back into Affinity

   

[MikeTO]

I created a bug report for this.

 

[Dennison]

Thank you!

Hopefully this will eventually improve the products for all users.