I'm having trouble seeing any ligatures appear in Pages. I've tried it with several fonts now, including some that have companion "pro" series, and I've ticked off all the options in the program that allow ligatures, but I don't see anything different.
My Questions:
1) Which oldstyle serif fonts support ligatures? I've tried Times New Roman, Garamond and Atlantix. Does anyone know if Gentium supports ligatures?
2) What exactly is supposed to happen when the ligature works? Does the text change instantly, or do they only appear when printed?
Mini,
Mac OS X (10.4.4),
fully organized font book
You can check this by typing the characters you want ligatured, selecting them, opening the font panel, and just moving from one font to another. Gentium does not support ligatures I think. You will see them on the screen, not just in printing. Have you tried Times, Lucida Grande, Palatino?
Thanks for your reply. Yes, I've tried those. No apparent result.
As I mentioned, it's hard to know whether it's working or not unless I know what I'm supposed to be looking for.
Are the subject characters supposed to change to the ligatured characters automatically? I can still move my cursor between the letters...does that mean that I'm not looking at ligatures, or can the ligature characters take a cursor in the middle?
The easiest thing is to highlight a font, and see if the Ligatures option is there. Click and unclick the ligature box to see the difference.
The best text string to check with is "ffi". ff and fi are about the first strings where a font will implement ligatures.
Times New Roman does not have ligatures, but Times does. Even Helvetica has some sort of ligatures, even though the difference is next to invisible. Zapfino and Palatino both have a big amount of typographic features.
(Tested with TextEdit on Panther, but Pages and Tiger should work more or less the same way.)
Yes, ligatures can take the cursor in the middle, even though the two characters are clearly connected. Do you really not get f and i connected when using Lucida Grande with Format > Font > Ligature = all or default, and unconnected when it = none?
I was expecting these ligatures to work like the fi and fl characters (Shift-Option 5 and Shift-Option 6), where they were treated as a single unit, and the cursor didn't go between them. Apparently these ligatures work differently.
Now I can see that in some fonts the characters touch, but I can't always tell if it represents a true ligature. Zapfino is an easy one to tell the difference.
So if I have a font like Garamond, with a companion Garamond Pro, how does it work. If I understand correctly, the companion set is not used by the ligature feature...the characters in the companion set must be entered manually?
It's not "an old style serif" font, but if you're just testing your Pages features, I'm pretty sure that Apple Chancery has lovely ligatures, especially on many of the capital letters.
I don't know of any "companion" relationship. Adobe Garamond Pro is Adobe's OpenType version of Monotype Typography, ltd's TrueType font Garamond. You would usually use one or the other for a text. Garamond doesn't have any ligatures. Adobe Garamond Pro does.
Or do you talk about some other Garamond Pro font?
I suggest using Font Book, selectable by choosing "Manage Fonts" to check out what a font contains (if you already have it). Choose Preview / Show Repertoire, and you can scroll through everything your font contains. The ligatures are instantly recognisable, being double or triple characters.
You won't have to choose these as characters. It's simply that if they are present, they are available to the kerning rules Pages applies, depending on your selection as to whether to use standard or all. Should you have chosen "all" and only standard are available, the result will be no different than had you chosen only "standard."
Having seen what your font provides - and that may be beyond just ligatures - the typography panel will help you exploit them. You can also use it first to check whether Preview Repertoire is going to interest you. Basic typographical features will shown, but not exampled, in the panel this brings up.
But if you want more detail from it, you will need to have entered the font you want to look up in pages - and for details as to alternates, etc., you will need to have entered some text. The alternates available for that will then be displayed for every character in your entry. Don't make it too long, since this is really for detailed work. And what you'll be shown is pretty schematic, so it helps to have seen the Font Book preview first.
Generally speaking, Pages will use the resources contained in a particular font. But if you've bought a supplementary set, such as small caps for Baskerville, say, you'll need to switch to that in order to use them, or Pages will simply scale them from those in your basic font.
As to your Garamond Pro, check its repertoire as I've indicated, and then compare it with your standard Garamond. If the pro set has the lot, you may not need the basic font - but if it only contains additional resources, you will need to continue with both, and select the Garamond Pro when you need to use what it has. Chances are though, that an Open Type Pro set may contain the lot. It would be nice to see that as standard; and day will come when we do.
As to your Gentium, if you have it, the above will answer your question.
Otherwise a search on Fonts.com, or other type suppliers, might answer that question for you: as with other fonts you may be considering, but do not yet have to inspect.
Topnotch typography is what Pages has foremost to offer us.
I'd bet many computer users can spot a document printed from word, or Appleworks & etc. on the instant. They conform to what the programs offer.
But with Pages, if you go your own way with it, you can look like you've been to the printers and paid for a professional job.
I suggest using Font Book, selectable by choosing
"Manage Fonts" to check out what a font contains (if
you already have it). Choose Preview / Show
Repertoire, and you can scroll through everything
your font contains.
Now we're getting hot...
This was my first error: I was previewing only the Sample, not the Repertoire. In the Repertoire it's quite obvious which fonts have the ligatures and which don't.
As to your Garamond Pro, check its repertoire as I've
indicated, and then compare it with your standard
Garamond. If the pro set has the lot, you may not
need the basic font - but if it only contains
additional resources, you will need to continue with
both, and select the Garamond Pro when you need to
use what it has. Chances are though, that an Open
Type Pro set may contain the lot. It would be nice to
see that as standard; and day will come when we do.
The Garamond Pro set contains only the additional characters — lots of them, mind you — but no plain lowercase letters, for example. From what you're saying I'll have to choose the specific characters I want manually, which kinda defeats the purpose, I think...
So now I'm on the lookout for full-repertoire fonts, so I can replace my older, less flexible fonts with better-looking ones.
Not always, necessarily. Depends whether you're using your new font's characters one at a time (e.g., for swashes ((fancy variants)) etc) or for a short passage of text (e.g., small caps for an initial phrase.
The latter will differ in detail from the small caps generated by Pages when you choose Format / Font / Capitalisation / Small Caps.
In the first case, yes, you will have to swap fonts each time you want something from the new set: in the second, no; just before and after the passage you need them for.
But do take care. Collecting good fonts can be expensive. There aren't too many of the classics, yet, that come in Open Type Pro. But you might like to investigate "font families" or similar, when ordering. Their contents should be listed in detail; and if they're not - shop elsewhere!
