Hello. I’ve scanned the forum but can’t seem to find the answer.
I’m working on a display font that features hundreds of ligatures. I have placed on each ligature numbered anchors something_1, something_2, and so on… However, when exporting and inspecting the font using FontGoggles, ligatures work but they don’t get combined with marks. It’s also not listing the liga2mark feature on the GPOS.
This is my first time creating a font like this so I’m not sure what I’m missing.
Do I need to generate each possible mark combination per ligature (and by doing so expand the font into thousands of ligatures)? Or should the marks be combined and positioned by the font itself when testing?
The mark to Liga lookups are in the mark feature.
Can you check if you have a up to date “languageSystems” prefix in Font Info > Features. The easiest is to set it to automatic.
And what text did you use exactly. Can you post a screenshot of the left FontGoggles sidebar?
the mark to liga works only with free combining marks. There are two things missing and the bigger one is that the ligatures are not working, it never gets to mark to liga.
To test, you need to change your input. use “l”, “e”, “l”, “e”, “acutecomb” (the easiest is to compute the string in Glyphs and copy it to FontGoggles). You should see two ligatures and one with the acute above the “e”.
To get it working with our original input, you need to decompose the accented letters. In the “ccmp” feature, add lines like:
sub eacute by e acutecomb;
There are two caveats. This line doesn’t work in Indesign with the default composer (one needs to switch to the World-Ready-Composer). And some apps interfere with the decomposition and compose immediately after again.
Unfourtunately, I don’t think regular type users and graphic designers (which are my main buyers) understand how combining marks work. They will just type in composed accented letters as you normally do in your keyboard. So in conclusion, I’ll have to find a way to scale the ligature system and develop precomposed accented ligatures.
The problem ist mostly with Indesign. So send them some complaints. I heard that Adobe is actually working on this and it might be fixed at some point.
