We get .eps files from a customer and the fonts have been converted to "outlines" or "curves". This one font they used is Avant Garde Condensed and whenthe lowercase letters "f" and "i" are used together like in the word "fish" are connected together with no dot over the "i" (see attachment).
My question is this:
Is this supposed to look this way (see attachment) is this some sort of special character in the Avant Garde font family? Or is this some sort of freak accident caused by converting fonts to outlines?
Thanks,
George
Yes, that's a ligature ... it dates from the days of metal type, when the rightmost end of the f character would overhang the body -- which was no problem if the next character was an o because it has a space above it to allow the f to overhang it. But if an f is followed by another f or an i there would be no space above the character and the tail of the f would break off. Consequently, fonts came with a selection of ligatures including fi fl ff ffl that had to be used instead of the individual characters.
Thanks for the detailed explanation, I guess the customer did not use the ligatures.
The font seems to have the ligature. It will enable the OT (Opentype) features in X6. You must have updated the text by clicking on the bar appeard at the top when you opened the file.
Select the Letters 'Fi' with the text tool and you will fine a tiny triangle below the characters. Click on it to get various available OT options for how you would like the characters to appear.
George M. said:Thanks for the detailed explanation, I guess the customer did not use the ligatures.
George M. said: I guess the customer did not use the ligatures.
Actually its because the customer used the ligatures that you have the f and i joined like that. Though the customer might not have been aware of using ligatures -- often, a program which supports them will do it by default, unless the facility is disabled.
If you just want to know if it is correct, then the answer is yes. It may or may not be what the customer intended, but it is what the customer provided.
If you are trying to recreate the result in CorelDraw using a font rather than the converted to curves text, you can only do it automatically with CorelDraw X6. Earlier versions did not have the facility.
Even X6 will only support it if the font contains the ligatures. On a quick test, X6 with Times New Roman (opentype) supports the ligature (unless you disable it). But try it with Arial opentype. CorelDraw says the font supports ligatures, but it looks like the font designer may have decided that ligatures in Arial should look exactly like normal characters! So, CorelDraw is substituting an fi for an f and an i but in that particular font it looks exactly the same.