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How can I get rid of ligatures in a font?

Posted: Sun Feb 12, 2017 9:38 pm
by inhahe
I don't know if "ligatures" is the right word, but the issue is that I have a font that automatically replaces "..." with a Unicode ellipses character and "->" with a Unicode arrow character and maybe other substitutions. I don't want it to do that, I want it to display the original characters. How can I remove those associations?

Note that I don't have FontCreator, I'm looking for a free solution for doing this. I currently have FontForge installed, but I'm open to installing any free software package to do this. I use Windows but I can use Linux if necessary.

Thanks

Re: How can I get rid of ligatures in a font?

Posted: Sun Feb 12, 2017 10:05 pm
by Bhikkhu Pesala
What font is this? I can imagine that someone might include an automatic glyph substitution for ... to ellipses, but -> to Unicode arrow is very unlikely. I am inclined to think that it is Autocorrect that is doing this. If undo fixes the issue, then that is the answer.

Which application are you using? These are standard replacements with Autocorrect in PagePlus and LibreOffice.

Re: How can I get rid of ligatures in a font?

Posted: Sun Feb 12, 2017 10:19 pm
by inhahe
Bhikkhu Pesala wrote:What font is this? I can imagine that someone might include an automatic glyph substitution for ... to ellipses, but -> to Unicode arrow is very unlikely. I am inclined to think that it is Autocorrect that is doing this. If undo fixes the issue, then that is the answer.

Which application are you using? These are standard replacements with Autocorrect in PagePlus and LibreOffice.
I'm not sure what you mean by undo, but I know it's not the application that's doing this. The application I'm using is mIRC (an IRC client). When I change the font it shows the original characters instead of the ligatures. Also I had asked before in #mIRC (an IRC channel or 'chat room') how to stop mIRC from doing this and they said it's not mIRC that's doing it but my font.

I guess the author of the font was just trying too hard..

Btw, I noticed when experimenting with it that it's not actually the font that's replacing "..." with the Unicode ellipses, apparently. I guess there's some common IRC client people are using that's converting it on their side before sending their messages. But my font is* doing the -> (and I would assume <-) substitution and I want to remove those..

Thanks

Re: How can I get rid of ligatures in a font?

Posted: Sun Feb 12, 2017 10:30 pm
by Bhikkhu Pesala
inhahe wrote:I'm not sure what you mean by undo, but I know it's not the application that's doing this. The application I'm using is mIRC (an IRC client). When I change the font it shows the original characters instead of the ligatures.
Typically, Autocorrect will change "straight quotes" to “Smart Quotes.” If you want to type 2" it's easier to use undo than to disable the replacement of quotes.
Autocorrect.gif
Autocorrect.gif (5.63 KiB) Viewed 16383 times
You have not told us what the font is. I suggest using a different font. Very few will do this.

Re: How can I get rid of ligatures in a font?

Posted: Sun Feb 12, 2017 10:41 pm
by inhahe
BTW I forgot to mention that the font is a TrueType font if that matters for anyone who knows how to do this..

Thanks

Re: How can I get rid of ligatures in a font?

Posted: Sun Feb 12, 2017 11:53 pm
by MikeW
Is there a way to turn off ligatures in whatever application you are using?

The substitution is because the ligature feature in the font is being activated by whatever application. If you cannot control the application's ligature function then you will either need to edit the font as long as you have the permission to do so, contact the font author and have them do it, or use a different font.

Mike

Re: How can I get rid of ligatures in a font?

Posted: Mon Feb 13, 2017 12:01 am
by inhahe
MikeW wrote:Is there a way to turn off ligatures in whatever application you are using?

The substitution is because the ligature feature in the font is being activated by whatever application. If you cannot control the application's ligature function then you will either need to edit the font as long as you have the permission to do so, contact the font author and have them do it, or use a different font.

Mike
But how do I edit the font and do that? I installed FontForge to see if I could find a feature to view and change the ligatures, but I didn't find one...

Re: How can I get rid of ligatures in a font?

Posted: Mon Feb 13, 2017 1:24 am
by MikeW
No idea. When I use FF, I only use it for getting drawn glyphs into it for other people that hire me. I hate the thing.

A quick Google search turned this up:

https://fontforge.github.io/lookups.html

Somewhere on that site will be your answer.

Mike

Re: How can I get rid of ligatures in a font?

Posted: Mon Feb 13, 2017 5:59 am
by Bhikkhu Pesala
If we had the font, or if you told us the name, we might be able to help.

Re: How can I get rid of ligatures in a font?

Posted: Mon Feb 13, 2017 11:56 am
by inhahe
Bhikkhu Pesala wrote:If we had the font, or if you told us the name, we might be able to help.
Thanks Bhikkhu, the font is Fixedsys Excelsior. http://www.fixedsysexcelsior.com/

Re: How can I get rid of ligatures in a font?

Posted: Mon Feb 13, 2017 12:19 pm
by Bhikkhu Pesala
There is no copyright or legal data in the font, and nothing on the author's FAQ page to say it cannot be modified. It is a free font.

So I have deleted the offending glyph substitutions and exported a new version with an *.otf extension to distinguish it from the original.

If it doesn't work email the font's author to tell him about your issues. I suspect that he designed it that way on purpose. Standard Ligatures are enabled by default.
Standard Ligatures.png
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Re: How can I get rid of ligatures in a font?

Posted: Mon Feb 13, 2017 12:44 pm
by inhahe
Bhikkhu Pesala wrote: So I have deleted the offending glyph substitutions and exported a new version with an *.otf extension to distinguish it from the original.
Thanks, it works! It was bothering me so much because in mIRC every message is preceded by a nick (i.e. a username) enclosed in <>'s, so if a nick ended in - it would show up as [nick] + [a right arrow] in this font, totally messing up the formatting. Also <---- and ----> and such happen a lot and it would mess those up too as you can imagine. And not to mention that I'm just a purist and like to see things in their true form.

And I couldn't really use another font because a fixed-width font is really most appropriate for IRC and, in the one that comes with Windows (FixedSys), Latin or whatever-they're-called characters don't mix with higher Unicode characters very well. Fixedsys Excelsior also looks better as far as normal Latin characters go anyway.

(Just to be clear your version works fine and fixes the problem, I'm just explaining why it was so helpful.)

I'm really curious as to how you did it. I'm not sure why I want to know since I'll probably never have to do this again, but the thing is that I downloaded FontCreator to do this (not realizing yet that I couldn't 'export' a font with the trial version), and I looked through every section of ligatures I saw and I couldn't find those two.

Thanks

Re: How can I get rid of ligatures in a font?

Posted: Mon Feb 13, 2017 1:01 pm
by Bhikkhu Pesala
There's only one set of ligatures for the Latin script.
Ligature6.png
Ligature6.png (55.02 KiB) Viewed 16352 times

Re: How can I get rid of ligatures in a font?

Posted: Mon Feb 13, 2017 1:05 pm
by inhahe
Bhikkhu Pesala wrote:There's only one set of ligatures for the Latin script.

Ligature6.png
Ok, not sure why I didn't see those there, maybe it didn't appear exactly as I was expecting.

I'm glad you took out the <-> and -- too.

Re: How can I get rid of ligatures in a font?

Posted: Mon Feb 13, 2017 1:10 pm
by inhahe
inhahe wrote:
Bhikkhu Pesala wrote:There's only one set of ligatures for the Latin script.

Ligature6.png
Ok, not sure why I didn't see those there, maybe it didn't appear exactly as I was expecting.

I'm glad you took out the <-> and -- too.
Oh, actually, I just figured out why I didn't see them. Long story short, I was looking at the wrong font, a variation of this font that I had found before that removes those ligatures but that I couldn't use because it overall looked crappy as heck. =P