If you've got a Unicode enabled application and a TrueType or OpenType font that actually has the ligatures, you should be able to get at them with PopChar or the Windows CharMap accessory.

For Type 1, the glyphs are normally unencoded even if present (they are present in pretty much all Adobe's Type 1 fonts). The only applications I know of that can access the ligatures in normal Type 1 fonts are InDesign (any version, will use them automatically) and Illustrator CS (but you need to use the Glyph Palette in Illustrator).

Hope that helps.

T

Corel Draw 12 supports Unicode, but not the previous versions.

Adam

Addison,

it depends what you mean by "supports OpenType".

If you mean support for OpenType Layout, then the answer is no. But Corel Draw can render all characters from OpenType fonts that have Unicode indexes assigned.

Adam

So where InDesign can insert ligatures and small caps and such with a menu command, CorelDraw cannot. But I could insert the characters with the character palette one at a time, right? I need to study up on OpenType...

CorelDraw isn't bad (I haven't used Quark in ages) -- I got it to play on my wife's laptop. The suite was less than $300 and it came with a nice collection of Bitstream fonts. The version I bought, version 11, works on Mac OS X, too, but Corel has since dropped Mac support.

Thanks for the explanation, Adam. That's kind of what I was thinking. However, I didn't realize that when InDesign inserts ligatures, the glyphs you see are unencoded. So the ligature is an unencoded glyph that visually represents two or more encoded glyphs? Whoa...

I agree about CorelDraw -- I bought it for the price, but it's impressed me so far.

Ligatures, just like small caps and other "variant" glyphs may or may not be encoded in an OpenType font. If they're encoded, they have custom (Private Use Area) codepoints. Applications should not access these glyphs via these codepoints unless they can't manage otherwise. InDesign does it the right way -- it parses the OpenType Layout tables where you have substitutions like:

feature liga { # Ligatures
sub f i by fi;
} liga;
feature smcp { # Small Caps
sub a by a.smcp;
} smcp;

(The above is written in a sort of programming code used by Adobe FDK for OpenType, a free OpenType creation tool; of course in the font, the substitutions are stored as binary code).

So, in InDesign when ligatures are activated and the font contains the f i -> fi substitution, InDesign stores the underlying text as "f","i" but "on the fly" displays the single "fi" ligature. Similarly, for small caps, InDesign internally stores the letter "a" but "on the fly" displays the "a.smcp" glyph.

This way, spellchecking or hyphenation that uses the underlying text still works. This is a great advantage of OpenType over primitive technologies such as "expert Type 1 fonts" used by QuarkXPress.

I recommend that you read http://www.myfonts.com/info/opentype/ for more information.

Adam