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#1
Posted to microsoft.public.word.docmanagement
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Ligatures and advanced typography features
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/comm...ocmanagemen t |
#2
Posted to microsoft.public.word.docmanagement
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Ligatures and advanced typography features
For more information on what I mean by ligatures and other elements, check
out http://www.myfonts.com/info/opentype...ed-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. |
#4
Posted to microsoft.public.word.docmanagement
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Ligatures and advanced typography features
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. |