fff and fffl Ligatures

Fonts and More General Font Discussions
1

I noticed that the Encore Master Collection fonts have an fff ligature, which may be used in German words. Some research also found a thread on the Typophile forums about other similar ligatures.

An fffl ligature could be used in words like Sauerstoffflasche (oxygen flask).

There are some spaces in the Alphabetical Presentation forms for such glyphs at $FB07 to $FB12.

I am wondering if I should add these to my fonts and how best to design them.

fff Ligatures.png
fff Ligatures.png787×285 4.38 KB

2

The “how best” looks like a simple matter of copying your existing ff and ffl glyphs, and duplicating the first f. I’m not at all sure about the “if”!

3

I came up with these designs for the Regular and Italic variants. Top word is without ligatures, bottom with ligatures.

Sauerstoffflasche Regular.png
Sauerstoffflasche Regular.png748×251 6.85 KB

Sauerstoffflasche Italic.png
Sauerstoffflasche Italic.png676×251 7.68 KB

4

I added some more new ligatures, and updated Sukhumala to version 1.40.

I also updated CompositeData.xml to make it easier to create the new ligatures.

  1. In FontCreator 8.0 Tools, Options, Copy Data Files, then Open the data folder
  2. Extract CompositesData.xml from the attached archive to the Composites folder
  3. Insert seven empty glyphs after the st ligature
  4. Add codepoints for those seven glyphs from 64263 to 64269 ($FB07 to $FB0D hex)
  5. Name the glyphs appropriately from fff to sk
  6. Complete Composites
  7. Edit the glyphs
  8. Add the glyph substitutions to your custom script and compile the script to test it.

liga:
sub f f f l → fffl;
sub f f f → fff;
dlig:
sub s f i → sfi;
sub s f y → sfy;
sub s f → sf;
sub s h → sh;
sub s k → sk;

New Ligatures.png
New Ligatures.png776×251 8.17 KB

CompositeData.7z (43.3 KB)