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.