Ligatures: "ff" and "fl" become "f" during PDF-Export

[Tobi-Wan]

When using the OpenSymbol Font, ligatures like "ff" of "fl" are shortened to "f" during PDF-Export (through Cairo). In ArialBlack everything works find.
Attached is a sample svg-File.

Cheers,
Tobi

[su_v (suv-lp)]

Which version of inkscape are you using? Can you try with a more recent snapshot from <http://inkscape.modevia.com/>?

This might be a related to bug #218045.

Works for me with Inkscape 0.46+devel r21461 on OS X, with
- Cairo 1.8.6
- OpenSymbol font <opens___.ttf> from OpenOffice.org 3.1.0

[Tobi-Wan (troll-faveve)]

Hi,

I have (on ubuntu linux)
    inkscape 0.46-5ubuntu4
    libcairo 1.8.6-1ubuntu2
    ttf-opensymbol 3.0.1-9ubuntu3 (Openoffice 3.01)

I'm reluctant to install other versions, since this is a production machine.

Tobi

[Tobi-Wan (troll-faveve)]

I noticed that "fl" and "ff" become a single character when using OpenSymbol, immediately after typing the letters. This doesn't happen when using Times or Arial. I didn't find an option to influence this behaviour.

[su_v (suv-lp)]

I'm not a font expert - here's what I learned so far: OpenSymbol is a glyph font containing unicode glyphs only. Basic Latin characters formatted in 'OpenSymbol' are rendered using a system or default font:

on Mac OX S:
 System: Lucida Grande
 OOo: Trebuchet MS
 Inkscape: Bitstream Vera Sans

on Linux: ?
 Inkscape: DejaVu Sans (?)

If the default font on your system or in Inkscape is DejaVu Sans, then your are seeing what is described in bug #218045, because DejaVu fonts do use ligatures for fl, fi etc., whereas Bitstream Vera Sans, Lucida Grande and Trebuchet MS don't (on OS X 10.5.7).

AFAIU this is not related to OpenSymbol but to the substituted font for latin characters. The export bug seems fixed in SVN - Inkscape 0.46+devel no longer cuts off the last character of ligatures when exporting to pdf.

I don't know how to change the substitute font in Inkscape 0.46 - might be hardcoded as default or fallback. Workaround: use OpenSymbol only for glyphs, not for regular text (use Vera Sans or Arial instead).

[jazzynico (jazzynico)]

This bug is very likely a duplicate of bug #218045. But good news, it's fixed in the dev build and thus in the incoming version. Please leave a comment if you have the opportunity to test a dev build and still have this bug.