Re: [Fontforge-users] Ligatures and small caps in Junicode

[Ralf S. <ral...@we...>]

On Mon, Sep 25, 2006 at 12:57 -0700, George Williams wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-09-25 at 11:29, Ralf Stubner wrote:
> > The following message is a courtesy copy of an article
> > that has been posted to gmane.comp.tex.xetex as well.
> >=20
> > Pablo Rodr=EDguez <oinos-S0/GAf...@pu...> writes:
> >=20
> > > It has been solved by adding the small cap ligatures. But I wonder
> > > whether this is the right method for doing it, since if scmp where
> > > applied first, there would be no characters to apply the f i liga G=
SUB.
> >=20
> > Yes, a correct ordering of the features would be better. Normally
> > fontforge does the right thing here. However, it seems the the incorr=
ect
> > 'liag' feature confuses fontforge. Renaming that to liga (even though=
 it
> > really isn't a ligature) gave a correct TTF. This is discussion is mo=
re
> > suitable for a fontforge list, though, which is why I am moving it
> > there.=20
> I don't have enough context to understand what is going on.
> You may adjust the order of features with
> Element->FontInfo->OS/2->Set GSUB/morx Ordering
>=20
> If you use non-standard feature names ff won't know how they should be
> ordered.

Ok, some more details. I have the sources for Junicode 0.6.11 here. THe
sfd file has several GSUB features, first ones being 'rtla', 'smcp',
'c2sc', and 'liga'. LAter on there also is an incorrect 'liag' feature=B9
If I generate a TTF from these sources using ff based on sources from
08:15 22-Aug-2006 the resulting font has a different order of the GSUB
features. It looks like they have been sorted alphabetaically whhich
means that 'smcp' comes after 'liga'. This causes problems when one
tries to use the 'smcp' feature on a word like 'file', since first the
'fi' ligature is formed and only after that small caps are used. See
Pablo's message from today.

Current CVS-Junicode solves this by introducing small cap ligatures like
fi, but I don't think this is the right approach. At one stage I thought
that correcting the typo in the 'liag' feature was enough to get ff to
produce a TTF with sensible feature ordering. However I can no longer
reproduce this. The features are still alphabeticall ordered.

It does help if I move the non-standard ' RQD' feature to the top
manually. Then the feature list in the TTF seems to be unaltered from
the SFD.

cheerio
ralf

1 It probably should be liga, although that isn't a real ligature. But
  the same applies to other things marked as liga.