Ligatures and advanced typography features

[Sam Greenfield]

It doesn't appear that either ligatures or advanced typography features of
OpenType are available in Microsoft Word 2007. This makes me sad. Ligatures
have been part of computer typography since the early 1970s and are a basic
feature of typography. Support for the most common ligatures, fi, fl, ffi,
and ffl, should be a standard part of any modern word processor. I would
expect Word to not only handle the basic ligatures, but also provide support
for OpenType features like discetionary ligatures and contextual features.

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[Sam Greenfield]

For more information on what I mean by ligatures and other elements, check
out http://www.myfonts.com/info/opentype-advanced-typography/

One of the main goals of including support is so that features like spelling
check still work. Doing tricks with "Insert symbol" breaks spell checking.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I agree; I was hoping for that, too, especially since I know they devoted a
lot of effort to Asian typography.

It doesn't appear that either ligatures or advanced typography features of
OpenType are available in Microsoft Word 2007. This makes me sad. Ligatures
have been part of computer typography since the early 1970s and are a basic
feature of typography. Support for the most common ligatures, fi, fl, ffi,
and ffl, should be a standard part of any modern word processor. I would
expect Word to not only handle the basic ligatures, but also provide support
for OpenType features like discetionary ligatures and contextual features.

----------------
This post is a suggestion for Microsoft, and Microsoft responds to the
suggestions with the most votes. To vote for this suggestion, click the "I
Agree" button in the message pane. If you do not see the button, follow this
link to open the suggestion in the Microsoft Web-based Newsreader and then
click "I Agree" in the message pane.

http://www.microsoft.com/office/com...7f05df&dg=microsoft.public.word.docmanagement

 

[Ted]

I agree.

After using Adobe's expert collection (for the Caslon font) for a decade, I
recently bought some Adobe OpenType Pro fonts that, like the Adobe Caslon
expert collection, have a number of ligatured special characters. But they're
all but useless unless one wants to write macros that would globally replace
the combinations fi, ff, ffi, ae, oe, etc., with their single graphemes (I
think that's the technical term for a typographical character). Even then,
the resulting words won't spell-check accurately, and if the text is
converted into a more conventional font that doesn't have the graphemes they
won't work, so one has to have an "undo" macro ready.

A few months ago I searched the Internet for an hour or two and located the
name and e-mail address of the person at Microsoft who appeared to have
something to do with glyphing and character management. (I don't recall his
name now.) I e-mailed him and urged that Microsoft Word 2007 beta support
advanced character controls, including for ligatures. He didn't deign to
respond.

I'm not even a professional type designer, just someone who likes typography
and regrets that typographical conventions that were available in the 1700s
are hard to implement today.