More and better ligatures

[dpk]

Need:

• A version of f with a shorter hook for use in German (and probably Dutch, etc). E.g. in the word Auflage, because of the morpheme boundary (Auf|lage), it is technically wrong to use an fl ligature, and an f with a shorter hook should come before the l instead. Also for combinations like få, fä, fü, the umlaut can be uncomfortably close to the hook of the f (or just collide with it) and a ligature for those combinations is probably the wrong thing to do. Then we’ll also need a version of ff ending in the short hooked version (Stoff|farbe, Schiff|bau), but no fff, thankfully, as there’s always a morpheme boundary there.
• fh, fb (halfback), etc with the crossbar connecting to the following character like in fl … then also ffh (offhand), ffb (offbeat).
• An fj ligature would be nice to have, for better support of languages where that’s a common combination (and loanwords in English like fjord).

But I’ll need to get comfortable with glyph editing to add these.

EB Garamond has a comprehensive set, including feature files that handle language specific rules in some detail.

[dpk]

As an example for what the f with shorter hook might look like:

Edit: Superseded, see draft-glyphs/f.deu.glif

[dpk]

fj will probably make it into 2.0 — I just designed it (and dcroat) in all weights and styles 🎉

[dpk]

The specimen of Aldus Manutius’s original De Aetna typeface from the SB Berlin appears to include a shorter-hooked f to use as a basis for the design. Happily, it confirms my approach above was basically correct.