[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.

"Sam Greenfield" wrote:

It doesn't appear that either ligatures or advanced typography features of
OpenType are available in Microsoft Word 2007. This makes me sad.