[Scribus] Ligatures and "Expert Fonts" again

[Andreas Vox]

John Jordan wrote:

> The absolute best way to do this, given the state of today's
> computers and software, is the way Adobe implemented it in
> InDesign.
> ...

> Adobe solved both these problems by holding the text internally
> without ligatures. Thus, the spell checker was not confused and
> other applications received text they could handle. For screen
> display and printing the alternate ligatures are used.

I don't know InDesign but I guess that's similar to what we plan to 
implement.

> Of course, this
> works only with OpenType fonts that are properly coded and which
> contain the ligature alternates. It does not work with the older fonts
> where the ligatures are in a separate "expert set."

We'll see about that :-)

> The system works extremely well. In the currrent version of
> InDesign there are several ligature options. You can turn on the f-
> ligatures, you can turn on "discretionary" ligatures (ct, st, etc.),
> and/or you can turn on swash alternates.

Charwise, paragraphwise or documentwise?

> I hope Scribus implements a similar scheme. I can't think of any
> other way to do it.

> And after the ligature issue is handled, could we have optical
> kerning? :)

Scribus currently relies on the kerning information in the font. We 
will add a manual kerning option soon.
Adobe's optical kerning is patented AFAIK (don't we hate those patent 
issues?).
I don't know about iKern (http://www.iginomarini.com/ikern.html).

/Andreas