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More typographic features - Discretionary ligatures


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We already support discretionary ligatures (with the 'dlig' tag). Isn't it working for you? You will need to select text that supports the feature to see the option in the Typography panel. I don't have the Chartwell font to test with, but it should work.

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I suspect the problem is not with the discretionary ligatures but what the font is doing with them to draw charts. We don't currently support ligatures between characters of different colour - it's not possible to have the "fi" fi ligature as a single glyph with the 'f' part one colour and the 'i' part a different colour. Beyond that, I'd need the font to see what is going on.

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Yes, maybe I can understand the issue. I don't think I can send you the font for more precise evaluations, since it is a licensed font. Anyway, it would be very useful to use it in Affinity, especially looking forward to Affinity Publisher...

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We already support discretionary ligatures (with the 'dlig' tag). Isn't it working for you? You will need to select text that supports the feature to see the option in the Typography panel. I don't have the Chartwell font to test with, but it should work.

A glyphs panel would be soooo  much more useful. You can sort the glyph by alternate character and decorative characters, symbols, etc. AD's solution is very incomplete. 

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We hope to do a glyphs panel at some point. I doubt it will include that kind of sorting, though, as the information needed isn't readily available in the font. If you want to find an alternate glyph for a given character, then we do support the 'aalt' OpenType feature which provides that.

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  • 2 months later...

The Typography section in the Character panel only has buttons for common things like standard ligatures and small caps, and it took a while before it dawned on me where to look for extra options such as 'dlig'. You need to go to the menu icon next to the closing 'x' at the top of the panel to get access to the 'Show Typography' option, and then it all works as expected.

 

I think access to the advanced options would be easier and more obvious if there were a 'More' button at the end of the standard row of buttons.

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Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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Show Typography is also in the main Text menu.

 

Thanks, Dave. For some inexplicable reason I failed to look there!

 

It sounds like it got hidden in the text toolbar because your window was too narrow to fit it in.

 

The Typography toolbar in the Character panel only goes from Standard Ligatures to Small Caps, no matter how wide I make the panel. Is there a separate Text toolbar somewhere else?

 

While playing with this just now, I found that the Discretionary Ligatures option only shows up for frame text, not artistic text, even with 'Show all font features' checked.

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Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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I've tried a lot of fonts in the Windows beta and discretionary ligatures always work fine for me. I do think it would be more useful if the second button in the character panel would be 'discretionary ligatures' instead of 'contextual alternates'. The former are well-known and widely implemented in serif fonts, the latter rare and unclear. Even for fonts with a lot of stylistic alternates or contextual swashes the button 'contextual alternates' usually doesn't work. That way the button can even be misleading. So you have to open the typography panel any way and that's fine for advanced opentype-settings. A 'discretionary ligatures' button is more straight-forward and would improve workflow because you wouldn't have to open the extra panel.

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I do think it would be more useful if the second button in the character panel would be 'discretionary ligatures' instead of 'contextual alternates'.

 

I agree. Contextual alternates is really more of an advanced feature.

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Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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The Typography toolbar in the Character panel only goes from Standard Ligatures to Small Caps, no matter how wide I make the panel. Is there a separate Text toolbar somewhere else?

 

By the "Text toolbar" I mean the row along the top of the main view, not the thing in the Character panel. I though we had a Typography button there, alongside the Character and Paragraph ones, but now I'm at work I can see we haven't. Sorry for the confusion.

 

 

While playing with this just now, I found that the Discretionary Ligatures option only shows up for frame text, not artistic text, even with 'Show all font features' checked.

 

That would surprise me. I just tried a few fonts, and for those it was both Art and Frame text or neither. Was there a specific font this happened with?

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 By the "Text toolbar" I mean the row along the top of the main view, not the thing in the Character panel. I though we had a Typography button there, alongside the Character and Paragraph ones, but now I'm at work I can see we haven't. Sorry for the confusion.

 

No problem, Dave. Thanks for checking!

 

While playing with this just now, I found that the Discretionary Ligatures option only shows up for frame text, not artistic text, even with 'Show all font features' checked.

 

That would surprise me. I just tried a few fonts, and for those it was both Art and Frame text or neither. Was there a specific font this happened with?

 

It surprised me, but it was easily reproducible when I reported it. Unfortunately, I didn't bother to take any screenshots (because I thought I could reproduce it at will) but it isn't happening now, of course. I'll look out for it happening again.

 

Edit: I think it may simply be that the 'dlig' option shows up automagically if the text cursor is placed in a word where the feature is applicable, but otherwise only shows up if you check 'Show all font features'.

 

I think access to the advanced options would be easier and more obvious if there were a 'More' button at the end of the standard row of buttons.

 

Any thoughts about the above suggestion?

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Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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  • 2 years later...
26 minutes ago, jaycanuck74 said:

Old topic, but I'm just wondering if a fix is being worked on?  While I don't use Chartwell often, I'm migrating a project that has it.

Unfortunately it seems I have to make the changes in CS5 and convert to paths and bring it over to Publisher

What aspect of the current handling in Publisher isn't working for you? (And, by the way, discussions about Publisher are best held in Discussions and Suggestions for Affinity Pubisher Beta on Desktop, where they are more likely to be noticed.)

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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On 2/15/2019 at 11:43 AM, MikeW said:

By the sounds of it, APub (still) doesn't yet handle color transformations in OTF fonts within dligs. I haven't tried the Chartwell fonts in APub. It's not about dligs themselves.

Yes, this is the case. I apologize that it's a Publisher project...but it's an overall Affinity issue (It also happens in Designer).

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  • 4 years later...
1 hour ago, Terentyev Publisher said:

Is it possible to choose which of the discretionary ligatures shall be turned on, and which off? At the moment I believe there is only a global on/off checkbox switch. Could be useful to be able to choose. Or, please, point at where the choice can be made, if this function is already present.

It's only On or Off, as far as I know. But if you really needed to enable/disable it on a more granular basis you could always use a Character Text Style assigned to specific pairs of characters.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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The "Standard Ligatures" feature is an OpenType feature so Affinity can't control which ligatures are included in the set.

There three most common ligature sets you will come across are "Standard Ligatures", "Discretionary Ligatures", and "Historical Ligatures".

  • Standard - includes the most common ligature glyphs - this feature is in many fonts and is on by default
  • Discretionary - includes less common ligature glyphs, some for special effects - this feature is in some fonts and is off by default
  • Historical - includes ligature glyphs that aren't popular now but are useful for mirroring period typography - this feature is uncommon and is off by default

Screenshot2023-12-25at10_29_27AM.png.2a3937ed782a17e23ecc3e134c894432.png

Download a free manual for Publisher 2.4 from this forum - expanded 300-page PDF

My system: Affinity 2.4.0 for macOS Sonoma 14.4, MacBook Pro 14" (M1 Pro)

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