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Part II: Ligatures and Expert fonts Last month I discussed my method for converting 7-bit (two-bit?) quotes and hyphens to true quotes, apostrophes, em and en dashes. A process I call “document purification,” it’s a task I undertake when I receive text files (or email messages, web pages, or word processor documents for example) that will later be incorporated into printed documents. This month I tackle ligature and expert characters. Ligatures are single characters made up of two or more other characters, usually the lowercase f in conjunction with other characters that might ordinarily collide with the f’s overhang. The most common ligatures are made using the characters fi and fl, which are included in the character sets of most Macintosh fonts (press Sh-Op-5 and Sh-Op-6 to type them). The top row was typed using standard keyboard characters, the bottom row uses ligatures. When to use ligatures The decision to use ligatures depends on the typeface. Not all typefaces contain fi and fl ligatures, and on the Windows side of the world, they’re not part of the character set at all (not yet anyway). Also keep in mind that in many cases, ligatures should not be used, even if they are available to you. Ligatures are most effective in body text in the range of 6 to 14 points, but this is just a general rule — they can be really cool in logos and headlines, depending on the font and spacing. In fact, spacing is the most important factor to consider before inserting ligatures. You should never use ligatures in letterspaced text, either expanded or condensed. This is because the space between the characters that make up a ligature will always be the same — it’s not adjustable — so if you adjust the amount of space between other characters in the text, either by increasing or decreasing it, the ligatures will stand out quite noticeably. Some fonts, especially serif text faces such as Garamond, Bembo, Caslon, Times, Bodoni, Adobe Minion, et al., look better when f-ligatures are used. But for many fonts, including most sans serif faces, the ligature characters look no better than the non-ligatures, so there is no reason to use them. A notable exception: the typeface Gill Sans, a very popular sans serif face used for both text and display, has good-looking f-ligatures. And you should probably avoid using ligatures with fixed-width fonts such as Courier, Letter Gothic, or Monotype.com (a cool monospaced font you can download for free from the Microsoft Typography site). Expert Sets Like I said earlier, on the Macintosh, the fi and fl ligatures are part of the normal character set for most fonts. In Windows, however, you can only use ligatures if you have separate expert fonts, which contain the common fi and fl ligatures, plus a whole bunch more. If you’re not familiar with expert fonts, they’re sold as companion fonts to the main fonts, and contain not only ligatures, but fraction characters, currency symbols, superior and inferior numerals as well. Companion expert fonts are not available for all fonts, but they are available for most of the important text faces from vendors such as Adobe and Monotype, as well as the FontSite 500 CD. The following ligatures are available in most expert fonts. Ligature Adobe Expert Fonts FontSite Expert Fonts Sh-W semicolon Sh-X Sh-comma Sh-V Sh-semicolon Sh-Y Sh-/ Sh-Z Sh-2 In case you’re wondering, the term “expert sets” came about because such characters were only used in fine typography, or for very specific typesetting needs by professional typesetters, book designers and printers. Fractions If you’ll be setting text with numbers requiring fractions, you may find the expert sets quite useful. For example, if you are setting stock quotes, the fractions and inferior/superior numerals contained in expert sets are more attractive and easier to set than the keyboard numerals found in standard fonts. Compare the following: The first line was set with numerals from a standard font, making fractions by typing a number followed by a slash followed by the second number. The second line was created with fractions from an expert set font. The fraction can be preceded by a space, or not — either way is acceptable because the fraction is clearly distinct from the number. Creating Fractions Without Expert Fonts Even if you don’t have access to expert set fonts, you can still create attractive fractions by noodling with font size and superscript values. If you’re a Mac user, you will need a font with a fraction bar. Most fonts contain this character, which is available by pressing Op-Sh-1. Unfortunately the fraction bar is not part of the Windows ANSI character set, so Windows users will have to try this procedure using the standard keyboard slash character. Type the integer part of the number, and note the point size you use. Type the numerator (the top number of the fraction) followed by the fraction bar (Op-Sh-1) followed by the denominator. Select the numerator and reduce its point size by a factor of 50%. With the numerator selected, superscript it by 33% of the original point size. Now select the denominator and reduce its size by 50%. Viola. Creating Fractions in PageMaker To create nice-looking fractions in PageMaker, format the numerator part of the fraction by setting the position to Superscript in the Type Specifications dialog box, and then click the Options button and change the Super/subscript size to 50%. PageMaker sets the superscript position to 33.3% by default, so there’s no need to change this value. To format the denominator, set its position to Subscript and change the Subscript position value to 0%. You never have to change the numerator’s or denominator’s point size — you are only changing percentage values — so you can select the entire number (integer and fraction) and change its point size in one shot. The numerator and denominator will be re-sized automatically. In other words, the entire fraction could be set to 12 points, for example, yet the numerator and denominator would be half as large as the surrounding text. If you changed the point size of all your text to 10 points, the fraction would be changed to 5 points without you having to do so manually. Quark users: QuarkXPress, with the Thingamabob xtension installed, handles fractions a bit differently, but with similar results. Type a number-slash-number, select it, and choose Make Fraction from the Type Style sub-menu under the Style menu. More on Converting Characters I mentioned earlier that PageMaker and Quark are good at converting some 7-bit characters, specifically quotes and dashes, when you import a document, but have no built-in capacity for converting these characters in text that has already been placed or typed. You have to deal with that manually using search and replace commands, or custom scripts. Well, one program you might not have thought of as a sophisticated typography machine is exceptionally good at purifying text: Adobe Illustrator. Huh? A drawing program, you say? Ah yep. Illustrator’s “Smart Punctuation” command can’t be beat, as far as built-in converters are concerned. It lets you replace ligatures, curly quotes, dashes, ellipses, and fractions, all from one simple dialog box. Select the text you want to purify, the choose the Smart Punctuation command from the Type menu. The Smart Punctuation filter knows whether you have expert fonts installed in your system or not (expert fonts are required in order for this command to replace certain ligatures and fractions). Wrapping Up So you can see, there are a number of ways of gettin’ mediaeval on your documents, purging all those lowly keyboard characters with righteous typographic ones, without having to spend a lot of time doing it. I admit, I actually enjoy the process, detail freak that I am. You can clean up your text before you place it, while you’re placing it, or after it’s been placed. I prefer to purify text documents prior to placing them in page layout programs, working directly with the text file, but that’s just my ritual. Most layout programs, and some word processors, have decent search and replace features for cleaning up 7-bit punctuation, but I rarely use them — my text files are as fine as summer mare’s tales before I import them (thanks to utilities such as Add/Strip). If the text files are in perfect shape before placing them, I can spend more time designing rather than tweaking. In the words of Pascal, “The stream is always purer at its source.”

Add/Strip   Download Add/Strip Here		The Best Way My preferred method of document purification relies on a very useful shareware utility called Add/Strip. This simple yet remarkable program processes text files (it doesn’t work with other file types), removing extra spaces, converting 7-bit characters, even cleaning up text files created on PCs, which usually contain unnecessary control characters and carriage returns at the end of every line, making the task of manually removing them a tedious one. Add/Strip cleans them up in a snap (and so does my favorite text editor, Tex-Edit Plus for that matter). Neither program can substitute fraction characters from expert fonts, however, so you’ll still have to do that manually. Add/Strip is available from several shareware sites on the web, including Cnet’s Shareware.com. The latest version is 3.4.1. The shareware fee is only $25 bucks. Add/Strip is designed to automatically perform much of the work of cleaning up text files destined for import to page layout programs, as well as export from page layout programs to simple DOS-based or mainframe computers. All in a fraction of the time needed to manually reformat using Find and Replace commands.
A screen capture from Add/Strip
		I’ve been searching for a Windows equivalent to Add/Strip, but have so far been unsuccessful. There are several search-and-replace utilities available, but none with any meaningful typographic controls (ligature substitution, straight-to-curly quote conversion, etc.). A new version of the excellent Super Note Tab has just recently been released, which is probably the best text editor available for Windows, approaching in many ways the awesome Tex-Edit Plus for the Mac, but Super Note Tab falls short when it comes to purifying text documents. If anyone out there is aware of such utilities for Windows, please let us know.