CSS/HTML question

[Man Eating Duck]

Originally Posted by Jellby

I don't understand this... do you mean you are entering the "ff" ligatures explictly (using the Unicode code points for them)? That's strongly not recommended, you should write "ff" as two separate letters, and let the renderer/font use the ligature if possible and available.

Of course not, it's probably the doing of Indesign's font-mangling and ADE trying to render ligatures anyway. I get it with some other fonts that I tested as well, while ADE 1.7.2 displays everything fine. The problem is easily fixed by replacing the font files with non-destroyed ones.

[Jellby]

After seeing the result, it looks like InDesign removes the ligature from the font, but keeps the information that there's a ligature... As far as I know, ADE will only render a ligature if it exists in the font, i.e., if it is defined there; so the font output by InDesign has the definition of the ligature, but the glyph is blank (which is a stupid bug, if you ask me). A possible workaround, if you somehow want to keep the mangled font, would be to include the explicit ligature characters somewhere in the book (possibly where they are not visible), hopefully that will force InDesign to include the ligatures in the mangled font, but you'd need to check all available ligatures.

ADE 1.7 probably works fine because it doesn't try to render ligatures at all.

[Man Eating Duck]

Originally Posted by Jellby

After seeing the result, it looks like InDesign removes the ligature from the font, but keeps the information that there's a ligature... As far as I know, ADE will only render a ligature if it exists in the font, i.e., if it is defined there; so the font output by InDesign has the definition of the ligature, but the glyph is blank (which is a stupid bug, if you ask me). A possible workaround, if you somehow want to keep the mangled font, would be to include the explicit ligature characters somewhere in the book (possibly where they are not visible), hopefully that will force InDesign to include the ligatures in the mangled font, but you'd need to check all available ligatures.

ADE 1.7 probably works fine because it doesn't try to render ligatures at all.

Yup, I believe that's spot-on, it would not be the first stupid bug in their epub export

I think the safest option is to replace the font, but I'll test your workaround out of curiosity when I get back to work Monday. Indesign CS 4 had a bug where it wouldn't include the font at all if it wasn't defined in a paragraph style, so we for instance included an empty paragraph styled with italic. This is probably a similar issue, although ADE 2.0 should've handled it gracefully.

[Man Eating Duck]

Originally Posted by theducks

You must be really old
All the metal type I set in High School was variable (OK about 4 distinct) widths. Ligatures as shown above, tuck adjacent characters in under the previous. (saving space ?)

@theducks: Actually I've never set any type, but working as a techie in a publishing house tends to make these kinds of facts seep in. Being incurably curious doesn't help

I know that types had different widths (m and l, for instance), but are you saying that the same type, ie an 'f', came in different widths? I still don't understand how you could make something like the ligature below width separate types?

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by Man Eating Duck

@ElMiko:As Jellby said, only the typographic ligatures are likely to cause issues.

Here are a couple of screenshots displaying the problem, my workaround is to replace the Indesign-embedded fonts with healthy ones and disable obfuscations, I've actually made a tiny cmd script to do that. The working version with a healthy font is on the right, you can also see that ligatures are rendered correctly in that one.

How interesting the Adobe have fallen into the trap while subsetting a font for an ebook that was raised and resolved in a few hours on a recent thread here discussing how best to implement font subsetting for ebooks. (The correct solution being. that all ligatures or swash characters that only contain characters included in the book's text should be included in the subset. Because it's impossible to tell which ones the renderer might want to use.)

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Man Eating Duck

@theducks: Actually I've never set any type, but working as a techie in a publishing house tends to make these kinds of facts seep in. Being incurably curious doesn't help

I know that types had different widths (m and l, for instance), but are you saying that the same type, ie an 'f', came in different widths? I still don't understand how you could make something like the ligature below width separate types?

No, different lcharacters had different widths, just as you stated.
(I set both Hot and Cold type in High school. I was going to learn plate making, but I graduated )

[Man Eating Duck]

Originally Posted by Jellby

A possible workaround, if you somehow want to keep the mangled font, would be to include the explicit ligature characters somewhere in the book (possibly where they are not visible), hopefully that will force InDesign to include the ligatures in the mangled font, but you'd need to check all available ligatures.

Including the actual ligature glyphs in a separate paragraph seems to work. I'm still not trusting the Indesign-generated fonts completely though, who knows what other problems might surface

[Jellby]

Be sure to include all existing ligatures that do not have a standad Unicode codepoint: ct, Th, fj...

[Man Eating Duck]

Originally Posted by Jellby

Be sure to include all existing ligatures that do not have a standad Unicode codepoint: ct, Th, fj...

Ah, so they would also have to be included if they are part of the font? This question might not make sense (I'm not used to editing fonts), but is there a simple way of seeing which ligatures exist in a font, even if they don't have a Unicode point? Alternatively, is there a comprehensive list somewhere I could use as a starting point?

Thanks a lot for your assistance, by the way

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by Man Eating Duck

is there a simple way of seeing which ligatures exist in a font, even if they don't have a Unicode point? Alternatively, is there a comprehensive list somewhere I could use as a starting point?

I don't think there's any comprehensive list... a font can define its own ligatures, I could (if I create a font) even decide that "two" should look like "2", i.e., I would define a ligature of t+w+o, and copy the glyph for "2" there, and then "artwork" would look "ar2rk".

For checking which ligatures are actually defined, I don't know if there's a better method, but I'd open the font in FontForge and look at the ligature tables. But FontForge is not very intuitive (and I'm no expert).