In a standard MacOS X application, you access glyph variants like Ligatures and other variants from the Font Palette's Typography option.
Each font can contain a large number of glyph variants or no variants at all. You can see exactly which glyphs are available in a font using the Character Palette.
There are of course different ways of handling glyphs in different kinds of fonts. Adobe and Microsoft use mainly OpenType fonts. Apple uses mainly TrueType fonts. OpenType fonts mostly work in MacOS X, but there may be some glyphs that MacOS X does not support.
For example, if you have Adobe InDesign, you can see a section of "Ornaments" glyphs in the OpenType font Adobe Caslon Pro. The selected pointed hand in the picture above is actually a "P" - something you can tell by copying it and pasting it to another application. You can also see that the unicode for the hand is 0050, and that is upper case P.
You can also see that the GID (Glyph ID) in Adobe's InDesign is 642. However Apple's Character Palette gives it GID 523. Clearly, something strange is going on.
If you access the Typography Palette for Adobe Caslon Pro in TextEdit, you do not have any Ornaments section. However, you can still double click the glyph in the Character Palette and display it in TextEdit.
In Pages you cannot even add it by double clicking it in the Character Palette, when you are running Mac OS X 10.4.
And why? Well, because it is an unsupported feature. It may not be a very exhaustive explanation, but that all there is right now.
2 comments:
I am using Georgia in Pages 08, and, despite having ligatures like fi and fl, Pages does not use them (while Mellel does). However, Pages uses the ligatures in Baskerville just fine. Any idea what is going on?
smdeban@autodax.net
Mellel has a better support for OpenType than Pages or TextEdit. Even though Georgia is not OpenType, it is a Microsoft font, so it may be vaguely related.
There is no reason to panic, however. That particular glyph is available as unicode FB01 (fi), and Pages displays it fine in Georgia, if you just paste it in - for example from this web page.
Pages will know that it is the two letters f and i, even though you cannot separate them. You can even search for the word using spotlight, and it will find it.
The only thing you cannot do is to type fi to get the ligature. You have to paste it.
To see other ligatures you can paste, you can go to the Character Palette > Code Tables > Alphabetic Presentation Forms.
Post a Comment