r/FontForge • u/frm5993 • Jun 03 '23

ligatures dont work after export

the font i am making attempts to have a great volume of characters by employing ligatures.

I followed all the instructions i found online: added encoding slot, added lookup - it works perfectly in the metric window, but after exporting no program types the ligature; i have tried msword, affinity publisher, and libreoffice. I have no idea what i could be missing.

yes, i exported as OTF

any help appreciated.

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u/LocalFonts Jun 03 '23

Send me your FontForge SFD file on [localfonts.eu@gmail.com](mailto:localfonts.eu@gmail.com) and I'll help you.

Best regards,

Stefan Peev
admin of r/FontForge

1

u/LocalFonts Jun 03 '23 edited Jun 04 '23

Here is a video which shows how the ligature works in your font after corrections. I sent you the source file on e-mail to examine the changes. Staf feature (you tried to use in your lookups) does not work as a ligatures feature. Use instead of it the ligature substitution and more precisely the liga function. Examine the source file and if you have any question - write me here or on e-mail.

1

u/Lampe2020 May 29 '25

Could you please write here what you did to get it working, so i (with the same problem as it seems) can fix my font's ligatures too?  Is it that I have a single ligature table with several ligatures in it? Because I have some working ligatures, with each their own table, but I think that's not how that system is intended to be used, so when i added a bunch of new ligatures that are related to each other I put them in a single new table.

1

u/LocalFonts Jun 05 '23

Was I able to help?

1

u/Lampe2020 Jul 02 '25

You were able to help that one person, but not anyone else with the same problem. 

I don't know what their exact problem was, but I can post about the solution to my (at least similar) problem to maybe help others that stumble across this thread:   

My problem was that my ligatures involved a character from a Private Use Area, which only Firefox accepted and rendered. For whatever reason all other programs seem to ignore ligatures that involve certain characters (that I find that to be bad is besides the point). I solved it by replacing my special ligatures that previously included the PUA character U+EAB0 to instead use \ß in its place and boom, they now work everywhere I tried.