missingmarbles's profile - activity

Here's a link to an image of what I'm looking to achieve: http://imgur.com/AQVU9Fp Note how in the bottom example, the 'fi' of 'fixed' and the 'fl' of flexible are shown as individual characters and it looks ugly because they come so close together. That's why the designer made a merged character that makes them flow together - like when a person hand writes a pair of t's like in 'letter' and crosses both of them in one stroke.

Thanks,

Some fonts, like versions of Garamond, have fancy characters called ligatures. In other programs, like Adobe Illustrator, when you type a combination of characters like "fi" as in "fixed" or "fl" as in "flexible", those combinations trigger the ligature that connects the two characters together. When I moved a PDF to LibreOffice Draw to add forms, all these combination characters just dropped out completely and I had to re-type them, and they are separated characters now, not the beautiful typography originally designed. There are other character combinations too that I don't know off hand.

Is it possible to get LibreOffice to use the ligatures that are in the font? How would I do that? I tried the Typography Toolbar ( http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center/typography-toolbar ), but even after I downloaded and enabled the extension the toolbar wouldn't show up under View > Toolbars - and I'm not even sure if it'll work.

EDIT: I'm using LibreOffice 4.1 on Windows 7.

EDIT Again: Also, I know some ligatures are UNICODE characters that you can find in the Special Characters menu in Windows, but not all of them. For example, in the typeface I'm using, there's a ligature combination for 'Th', but for this and other ligatures there is no such UNICODE character. I can find this character in a font menu in Adobe Illustrator - is there any analog to this in LibreOffice Draw?

Thanks!