RE: Faulty ligatures in Adobe PhotoShop

From: Kent Karlsson (kentk@cs.chalmers.se)
Date: Thu Aug 28 2003 - 08:55:51 EDT

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    Doug Ewell wrote:
    ...
    > > My copy of Photoshop 7 has an interesting image in its (HTML format)
    > > help file, page <1_16_4_13.html> on "Using ligatures and old style
    > > numerals". It shows three examples of «Type with Ligatures option
    > > unselected and selected»: "ct", "fi" and "fh".
    > >
    > > The bad part of it is that the ligated characters shown (in the
    > > sencond and third examples) seem to include a long "s" instead of an
    > > "f"... > <ty_06.gif> attached for reference.
    >
    > There is no "fh" ligature in Unicode,

    No, but is is perfectly permissible to ligate f and h anyway, just like you
    can (or should) ligate f and j, and g and j (if the glyphs would overlap).

    > so Photoshop may have been trying
    > to substitute the "closest" available ligature to the one you wanted
    > (which is wrong, of course).
    >
    > Substituting an unligated ſi (U+017F + U+0069) for fi (U+0066
    > + U+0069)
    > makes no sense at all. If the current font doesn't contain an fi
    > ligature (U+FB01), Photoshop should just leave the combination alone.

    U+FB01 is a compatibility character that is best avoided to use at all. Formation of
    of an f and i ligature should not depend on if the character U+FB01 is supported
    or not (though it is likely to be supported if f and i are ligated).

                    /kent k



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