Ligatures

[AlanPickup]

I am starting this as a new thread as there are numerous postings re ligatures and I just wanted an observation to be picked up across them all. I decided to download the beta versions of the Affinity suite and load my newsletter in there as I wanted to try substituting the Roboto family font for the Arial in the newsletter and to test the beta in general. I used the font manager to locate Arial fonts and then change them for the Roboto equivalent Every time the font manager found the Arial font it stopped highlighting the section where a ligature occurred, I then had to change the ligature separately then carry on and highlight the rest of the text. selecting all the text to change in that text box seemed to still need conversion or it would not convert it.

After substituting all the Arial fonts for Roboto equivalent I exported with the web PDF preset and all the ligatures appeared in the Chrome browser  - lesson learnt to not use Arial with Affinity Publisher

[lacerto]

(...)

[AlanPickup]

Thanks for your reply

If you find the previous threads on this subject you will find I have tried many options and others have had the same problem with Arial and this was just an  observation to show that Publisher breaks at ligatures when highlighting the text with the font manager locate tool

I am quite happy with the Google Fonts Roboto family and with this being recommended for web use I will use this as my standard sans body font as most of my work is for viewing online.

[lacerto]

(...)

[Dave Harris]

Arial defines the code points for fi and ff ligatures, which Publisher will use if ligatures are enabled.

Publisher exports the ligatures correctly, but some browsers don't understand them if fonts are not embedded. This is a bug in the browsers, not in Publisher. The "for web" preset currently does not embed common fonts, and Arial is one of these, so that is why you get the issue with Arial and not with Roboto. The only way I can see to workaround the browser bugs is to always embed fonts. We'll change the "for web" preset to do that in the next beta (which is a shame as it does make the PDFs bigger).

So far as I know, subsetting the font does not cause a problem with these browsers.

I'm not able to reproduce a problem with Font Manager > Locate stopping at ligatures. Can you attach a small sample document that illustrates it?

[lacerto]

(...)

[AlanPickup]

Hi Dave

I have extracted a text box from the newsletter that seems to break at a space in the first line and at the ff in effectiveness when using font manager,Ligature break.afpubLigature break.afpub hope it transfers it shows up in the uploaded version

[Dave Harris]

1 hour ago, AlanPickup said:

Hi Dave

I have extracted a text box from the newsletter that seems to break at a space in the first line and at the ff in effectiveness when using font manager,Ligature break.afpubLigature break.afpub hope it transfers it shows up in the uploaded version

In the first line it looks like you have a normal space and then a non-breaking space before the word "above". If I resize the frame it will break at the normal space, which I think is correct. It's easier to see what is going on if you use Text > Show Special Characters.

I can only get it to break at the "ff" in "effectiveness" by resizing the frame so narrow that it can only fit a couple of letters per line. There's no particular reason why it shouldn't break there.

[AlanPickup]

This is the sequence on my machine each time I press locate

 

 

 

[Dave Harris]

Thanks; I understand what you mean now. I've logged this to be looked at.

[Patrick Connor]

We believe the issue "Font Manager Locate does not locate full runs" has been fixed in 1.8.0 [Publisher beta is currently available if you care to check].