From the course: Type Tips

Getting the most from discretionary liigatures

From the course: Type Tips

Getting the most from discretionary liigatures

- [Nigel] Hi, I'm Nigel French. Welcome to Type Tips. This week I'm in InDesign, and I'd like to show you how to get the most from discretionary ligatures. Firstly, a definition. A ligature is when two or more glyphs are fused together to make a single glyph. The most common examples being F-I, F-L, F-F-I, F-F-L. This is usually for a better fit. And I talk more about this in my InDesign typography course here in the training library. Open type fonts typically come with a standard set of ligatures, but the type designer may choose to create additional ligatures that you can use at your discretion to make the type more bespoke. In this book of poetry, I'm using the typeface, Mrs Eaves, which has more discretionary ligatures than is common. In fact, it's one of the reasons I selected Mrs Eaves for this job. We can access the discretionary ligatures through the Glyphs panel. Let's just compare Mrs Eaves, what we see here, and I'm filtering my view to just discretionary ligatures, compare this to Minion Pro Se. And we can see that we have a whole lot more available. We can insert these discretionary ligatures one by one through the Glyphs panel, or we can use the type contextual controls. Now, assuming these are turned on and you'll find them in Advanced Type, right here, you can select the character pair and then choose the discretionary ligature if available. If you want to turn them all on, then you can come and edit the paragraph style that is applied to the text. Come to your Open Type Features and just select Discretionary Ligatures. To see at a glance where these have been applied, we can turn on a composition highlight. This is of course non-printing. Preferences, Composition, and Substituted Glyphs. Windows users, your Preferences will be under the Edit menu. If, having turned them all on, you just want to turn off selected ones, let's say for example, I don't like the S-P ligature, I can select that and then use the type contextual controls to turn it off.

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