[scribus-dev] a frog in Scribus

[Pierre Marchand]

Vous (Ludivine LOISEAU) avez écrit :
> Hello!
>
> The font NotCourier-sans contains a special ligature that should make
> a little frog appear at the moment you type 'OSP' (in capitals).
>
> http://openfontlibrary.org/media/files/OSP/289
>
> This ligature is encoded in "Common Ligatures lookup 0 subtable on
> the same level as fi, fl, IJ, ij, etc.

Bad idea, as you’ve said it, it’s a _special_ ligature and should not be 
programmed as standard ligature.

> It works fine in Inkscape 

And this is why.
AFAIK, Inkscape uses Pango to render text (or even if it does itself the idea 
remains the same) and Pango has its own idea about fonts. Especially 
it "thinks" that a font is exclusively intended to produce text and I would 
add well-formed text. To achieve this, it uses standard ligature for latin 
scripts to make it more readable, or just to stick to the spec[1] :). So here 
is my point, changing "OSP" string into a frog is fine as long as you put it 
in discretionnary ligatures or swatch or stylistic set or whatever. Because 
as it is now, it just prevents to type "OSP"!

> but we cannot make it work in Scribus 
> 1.3.3.12  nor 1.3.4. Are we overlooking something?

Scribus has a train late here and does not yet support OpenType features, 
period.
To work around this limitation, you should do as Adobe did for years, just 
encode extra glyphs in the PUA (yes, it can’t get glyphs which are not 
encoded too (although we could fix it more easily then plain OTF support)) 
and grab them by hand in Scribus with[F12]+XXXX.
Currently, I’m working on this but since days are just 24h long I can’t say 
when it will be ready. At least there is a dedicated branch for it and I’ve 
opened my working copy yesterday, not so bad!

I know how scribus can be frustrating sometimes when you hit this kind of 
issue, but nothing can’t be tricked.

HTH

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/features_ko.htm
"Tag: 'liga'
[...]
UI suggestion: This feature serves a critical function in some contexts, and 
should be active by default."

-- 
Pierre Marchand
http://www.oep-h.com