Quick question about Eureka

Maurice Meilleur

Anyone with a license for FF Eureka: are old-style figures turned on by default?

I'm asking because I'm reviewing a book set in Eureka, and the text uses no ligatures. Yet the numerals are all old-style. Trying to decide if this is careless or weird.

Nick Shinn

Neither. IMO “no ligatures” is just part of the design.
Same thing in other nominally old style faces such as Palatino and TheSerif.
In Eureka, it may have something to do with the profusion of Slovak accents.

I’m not sure the relationship between old style figures and old style faces is particularly close—old style figures are quite promiscuous these days.

I’ve designed several “no ligature” serifed faces for newspapers (because of primitive pagination systems that don’t support ligatures), and at least one of them, Pratt, is an old style face with default old style figures.

Craig Eliason

From a quick look at fontshop.com I deduce that many packages of FF Eureka have ligatures, but the "Offc" package does not.
(I thought that that might explain your book's typesetting, but actually Eureka Offc has lining figs so that's not a simple explanation for what you're seeing.)

To echo Nick, Millennial, my text font-in-progress, has default oldstyle figs and no default ligs, at least right now.

Nick Shinn

Sorry, my mistake, it does have ligatures.
But I still thing it works perfectly well without them, which really makes them a bit of an affectation.
But perhaps such affectation would be good in the book you’re reviewing, Maurice?

Christoph Koeberlin

Hi Maurice,
at FontFont we generally offer fonts in two different desktop formats:
– OT/Pro with CFF outlines, varying standard figures and OpenType layout features
– Offc/Offc Pro with TrueType outlines, no OpenType layout features and always tabular lining figures as default figures.
So just check the character sets of the different formats (https://www.fontfont.com/fonts/eureka/regular#tab-glyphs) and have a look at the features (https://www.fontfont.com/fonts/eureka/regular#tab-features), then you can decide what’s right for you (→ Buying Options).
Eureka OT/Pro has old-style figures as the default figures and contains ligatures, of course.
Best,
Christoph

PS: Feel free to drop me a line at christoph☺fontfont.de if you have further questions about FontFonts.

Maurice Meilleur

Nick, you're mostly right about Eureka--the minuscule f takes up less space to the right than in many other faces--but there were more than a few places where ligatures would have come in handy. The text is in German, so at first I thought I was seeing in action the German typographic convention of not using ligatures across syllable breaks, but when I looked more closely I saw they were totally absent.

The text has other quirks: it uses a combination of German and English quotation marks, which looks odd even if you choose one or the other systematically to match the language of the quote, and paragraph spaces are made with an extra line and a huge first-line indent. So I thought the missing ligatures was worth mentioning, too. I just wondered whether I'd be able to guess at what happened, and I thought the figures would be a clue: if oldstyle is on by default, then maybe the designer just forgot; but it would seem weird to me to remember to turn oldstyle figures on, but leave ligatures off.

Maurice Meilleur

Craig: that was the first place I looked as well, just to check. I freely confess that Eureka is not my favorite text face, so I'm inclined to judge its applications more harshly, I suppose.

kupfers

You have to keep in mind that Eureka was published in 1998 – 15 digital years ago – and the designer of said book might not have obtained his version in the last couple of years since OT is the norm. The old PostScript Eureka has OSFs as standard numerals and special characters in an expert font. Also, I think that using ligatures is not a requirement if the characters are designed in a way they would work without ligatures. Using different quotation marks or typesetting conventions for different languages is not something I would consider bad design. It is actually suggested in quite some text books if you are quoting more than one sentence or short paragraph in a different language.

Maurice Meilleur

Indra, those are really good points. I'd totally wiped expert sets out of my memory. I should know better than to assume everyone is constantly dumping their money into updating their older fonts.

As for the quotation conventions, that practice would certainly make Germans more considerate than Anglophones, since I don't think I've ever seen an English-language book that used guillemets for German-language quotes.