Comments on: Ligatures in Mac OS X

By: simon kayt

simon kayt — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 10:31:50 +0000

I would like to use the common ligatures of Oe as in Oedipus or oedema. or ae as in aedis christi in word for mac or windows: can anyone ofm you brainy typography experts tell me how to do that? thanks

By: TheNetAvenger

TheNetAvenger — Wed, 23 May 2007 04:58:13 +0000

Ok, I am a graphic designer and yes this is really nice.

However, it is not so amazing. Show me an ‘Q’ with a Tail that wraps back over the word, and then you will get me to go wow, ‘real’ ligature support. OSX’s ligature support is barely beyond kerning offsets.

In comparison, Windows 2000 even supported these basic Ligatures, like OSX does. Let’s demand a bit more from OSX and Apple, they need to give us ligature support like in Microsoft added in Windows Vista, which can do the flowing tails and has extensive ‘dramatic’ ligature font support throughout the OS.

By: Matt

Matt — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 02:17:20 +0000

Yeah, I noticed this while typing the other day. The only one I could find was ff though, and I didn’t know it was called a ligature. It’s nice to know Apple put these little touches in the Operating System, and that people notice and appreciate them.

By: Kamal Mubarak

Kamal Mubarak — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 14:13:54 +0000

I should add that it changes from font to font. Try in TextEdit with Times and Times Roman

By: Kamal Mubarak

Kamal Mubarak — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 14:08:56 +0000

Not always good. Try typing liters per minute as l/min and see what ligatures can do!

By: Scott Harrison

Scott Harrison — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 11:50:59 +0000

By default ligatures will be automatically used if the font supports them. There is no problem with a spell checker, indexing, etc. because ligatures only affect the APPEARANCE of the word and not the actual letters that make up the word. You can experiment in TextEdit by using the Format->Font->Ligature menu to turn ligatures on and off in a font like Times.

By: Eugene

Eugene — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 11:38:28 +0000

Well, when I’m writing “efficient” in this comment field I see ligature. Not every font have ligatures, so it’s fine that you don’t see them sometimes.

By: Walt French

Walt French — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 11:18:35 +0000

Big whoop that the menus look nice. How about making the USER more capable?

Howzabout when I type “efficient” (or another word that looks awful in most typefaces, e.g., Times) in a document, that the ligatures, if they exist in that typeface, be automatically displayed? … And that the spellchecker doesn’t choke on the goofball “spelling,” that indexing still works, … Otherwise, this is a tiny piece of eye candy with most results just as bad as MS Word under windows.