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indestructible-type / Jost

Jost* by indestructible type*
https://indestructibletype.com/Jost.html
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f-ligatures? #53

Open uncinarynin opened 4 years ago

uncinarynin commented 4 years ago

I think that Jost* is a chance to revive features that got lost during the development of Futura.

Besides oldstyle figures (already covered in another request), would it be possible to add proper ligatures for ff, fi, fl, ft as seen in early Futura designs?

https://typografie.de/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/9783874398930_futura_na10.jpg

EwonRael commented 4 years ago

This is interesting...

I'm not sold on having this by default, but it might be fun to include them as an option.

uncinarynin commented 4 years ago

It seems like Unicode doesn't even have a place for ft; what it does have are the following:

ff U+FB00 latin small ligature ff fi U+FB01 latin small ligature fi fl U+FB02 latin small ligature fl ffi U+FB03 latin small ligature ffi ffl U+FB04 latin small ligature ffl ſt U+FB05 latin small ligature long st st U+FB06 latin small ligature st

curiously U+FB05 appears like ft in many fonts, probably because the need for long s is only seen in blackletter types and they provided no place for ft?

Adobe Illustrator does automatic ff, fi, fl, ffi, ffl with Myriad Pro. Not sure how to use this, for a start it would be good just to provide these ligatures in their places and leave it to the user to pick them if needed .... or how can "optional opentype ligatures" be used?

EwonRael commented 4 years ago

Those automatic ligatures are something that us designers can bake into the font. I have quite a bit of ligatures in Bodoni, fi ffi ff fl even fj. I'm sure that Myriad Pro works the same way, and that if you got Bodoni the ligatures should work by default similarly.

I'm happy to design ligatures, my hesitation come from programming them in by default. "fi" ligatures and the likes are an absolute must for me when it comes to serif typefaces, but for whatever reason they have often felt contrived for me in sans serif typefaces. For example, I always find the "fi" ligatures in Roboto distracting, perhaps too stylistic in what would otherwise be a neutral typeface. Maybe this is just because historically speaking, the most popular sans serif typefaces have foregone "fi" ligatures in common use. Think Futura or Helvetica. They also have the admittedly rare disadvantage of not changing the kerning when a designer manually increase or decreases the kerning for the entire word. You end up with a situation like this:

"fi n e s t   c h o c o l a t e s"

Like I say, I would be happy to add ligatures and just not have them on by default.

uncinarynin commented 4 years ago

If the feature is added, I would be happy to use it. But what does "not on by default" mean, is there a (font-side) way to switch automatic ligatures on/off? Would it mean to have to dig into a character table to search for the needed ligatures? (That can be tedious)

bcnno commented 1 year ago

any updates? would also love to see at least an option for the f-ligatures