OSX Sequoia weird issue with ligatures

Jacques Le Bailly
Jacques Le Bailly Posts: 93
in Font Technology
I just got a question by a customer.

When setting text with their custom typeface in Sequoia and IOS 18, the ligatures fi and fl behave as if they have the width of a lowercase f.

For example if the type the word 'Confirm', the r is positioned on top of the i.

They tried it in several apps.

Does anyone recognize this ? Fonts were generated about a year ago.

Comments

  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,225
    OSX Sequoia or IOS 18? Which apps?
  • Jacques Le Bailly
    Jacques Le Bailly Posts: 93
    On both systems.

    One app I am sure of is text editor on OSX Sequoia. The others were screen shots
  • Kent Lew
    Kent Lew Posts: 944
    Could it be related to Ligature Caret List information in GDEF table being interpreted incorrectly? Just a guess.
    Were the fonts produced with Glyphs by any chance?
  • Jacques Le Bailly
    Jacques Le Bailly Posts: 93
    I was thinking of the Ligature Caret as well as the potential issue. But there are no carets in the file.

    Why the question about Glyphs ?
  • Kent Lew
    Kent Lew Posts: 944
    Because Glyphs makes the addition of Ligature Caret fairly automatic with Set Anchors routine and many may not realize they added it. (Not saying this would have been you.)
  • Kent Lew
    Kent Lew Posts: 944
    edited September 26
    Are there other f-ligatures that don’t exhibit the issue? If so, that would give you a point of comparison. But you probably already checked that. 🤔
    What happens with 'ffi' — does it behave with width of one 'f' or two? or ... ?

  • Jacques Le Bailly
    Jacques Le Bailly Posts: 93
    As far as I can tell it happens in the 'fi' and 'fl' ligatures. In the samples sent by the client, the 'ff' ligature isn't used, so I cannot compare. There is no 'ffi' of 'ffl' ligature in the typeface.

    I don't have Sequoia installed yet myself.
  • Erwin Denissen
    Erwin Denissen Posts: 302
    If it is an OpenType layout feature related issue within the font, then I suggest to use the Proofing tool from FontCreator to reveal the problem.
  • Mark Simonson
    Mark Simonson Posts: 1,739
    edited September 27
    This sounds kind of like a font caching issue to me. You say this is a custom font, which I assume you're developing. Have you sent them multiple versions of the font?
  • Jacques Le Bailly
    Jacques Le Bailly Posts: 93
    I delivered the font almost a year ago. So it shouldn't be a cache problem

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