Avant Garde ligatures

[Gerry Kowarsky]

It seems to me that Avant Garde offers one of the great unrealized opportunities of the OpenType format. To my knowledge, the ligatures in the original Avant Garde were never included in Type 1 and TrueType versions of the font, at least not in the ones that are widely distributed. Even if the ligatures had been available, using them would have required a great deal of hand setting. I would love to see an OpenType version of Avant Garde with the full complement of ligatures along with contextual substitution rules that would automate the ligatures' use.

[ktinkel]

Originally Posted by Gerry Kowarsky

It seems to me that Avant Garde offers one of the great unrealized opportunities of the OpenType format. To my knowledge, the ligatures in the original Avant Garde were never included in Type 1 and TrueType versions of the font, at least not in the ones that are widely distributed. Even if the ligatures had been available, using them would have required a great deal of hand setting. I would love to see an OpenType version of Avant Garde with the full complement of ligatures along with contextual substitution rules that would automate the ligatures' use.

Not sure that would have the intended result. The ligatures were designed for a specific purpose (for the nameplate of Avant Garde magazine) and on the few occasions where I have seen them used elsewhere, they kind of stand out as awkward.

Coincidentally, Frank Romano wrote about Avant Garde in the April issue of Electronic Publishing.

Among other points, Romano quotes Ed Benguiat (who designed the condensed version of Avant Garde for ITC):

The first time Avant Garde ligatures were used was perhaps the only time they were used correctly … Type designer Ed Benguiat said, “The only place Avant Garde looks good is in the words ‘Avant Garde.’ Everybody ruins it. They lean the letters the wrong way.”

[Stephen Coles]

FontShop now offers the Avant Garde Ligatures via Scangraphic/Elsner+Flake. The announcement.

[ktinkel]

Originally Posted by Stephen Coles

FontShop now offers the Avant Garde Ligatures via Scangraphic/Elsner+Flake. The announcement.

Thanks, Stephen.

I didn’t realize E+F was associated with Scangraphic. Sounds like pretty good news to me. I have some old SG fonts (Zapf Renaissance, Today Sans), but didn’t realize the library was being updated.

[ktinkel]

Originally Posted by Gerry Kowarsky

I would love to see an OpenType version of Avant Garde with the full complement of ligatures along with contextual substitution rules that would automate the ligatures' use.

FontHaus offers AG ligs from E&F in OT, but I would bet they are not sophisticated ones.

I scanned Avant Garde Medium ligs from the ITC specimen book (see the attachment). For comparison, look at E&F AG Medium at the Fonthaus site.

The crucial CO lig seems to be missing from the E&F set, as well as SS and LL; and to the extent I can see from a screen shot, the KA is not correctly drawn.

Interestingly, although my Letraset catalogs do not show it, Keith Tam has posted scans from sheets of Letraset AG (click on Avant Garde at the left and scroll through the pages). His scans show an extra, very distinctive SS on page 3 of that set (evidently only in the heaviest weight, though).

Silly me — I gave two huge piles of transfer type, including various weights/sizes of Letraset Avant Garde, to a grammar school art teacher a few years ago. I have been kicking myself ever since.

Anyway, just noodling on Avant Garde. I’m not sure it is a good font for mere mortals to use (it may require Herb Lubalin’s brilliance).

[Gerry Kowarsky]

Originally Posted by ktinkel

I’m not sure it is a good font for mere mortals to use (it may require Herb Lubalin’s brilliance.

I agree with you there. That's why I'd like to see an OpenType version with the substitutions preprogrammed, just as they are in script fonts such as Adobe's Bickham Pro, Linotype's Zapfino, and (most recently) P22's Cezanne. But maybe greater capability would foster greater misuse.

[ktinkel]

Originally Posted by Gerry Kowarsky

I'd like to see an OpenType version with the substitutions preprogrammed, just as they are in script fonts such as Adobe's Bickham Pro, Linotype's Zapfino, and (most recently) P22's Cezanne. But maybe greater capability would foster greater misuse.

I imagine it will happen, one day. But you wouldn’t want every Co to be replaced by the Co ligature, surely? Nor would you necessarily want every A to incline one way (or another). Sounds like a tricky programming task to me — and using it might not be much less work than just schlepping the glyphs around as needed.

There are so many more ways to screw up with this font than to use it effectively …

Originally Posted by ktinkel

I imagine it will happen, one day. But you wouldn’t want every Co to be replaced by the Co ligature, surely? Nor would you necessarily want every A to incline one way (or another). Sounds like a tricky programming task to me — and using it might not be much less work than just schlepping the glyphs around as needed.

There are so many more ways to screw up with this font than to use it effectively …

Kathleen,

Do you really think this font could still be screwed up much more ;-(? I like it a lot, although I prefer by far Futura, but it's a lot misused, starting from PageMaker design hints for the Mac about 20 years ago that recommended use of Palatino for text body and AvantGarde for titles (and they really did it themselves!)?

What do you mean talking about effective use? And, despite of what you quote, the mentioned ligatures did exist in a QuickDraw version ten years ago (see another message from me in the thread), just like Futura had ligs and OsFs initially, that completely disappeared in any commercial version, besides of parts implemented in recent Berthold issues (prohibitive pricing, though).

Think the main problem is Unicode and its degree of adaptation to real world's needs, as well as its implementation in commercial software those days.

Kindest regards,

Christoph

Originally Posted by Gerry Kowarsky

It seems to me that Avant Garde offers one of the great unrealized opportunities of the OpenType format. To my knowledge, the ligatures in the original Avant Garde were never included in Type 1 and TrueType versions of the font, at least not in the ones that are widely distributed. Even if the ligatures had been available, using them would have required a great deal of hand setting. I would love to see an OpenType version of Avant Garde with the full complement of ligatures along with contextual substitution rules that would automate the ligatures' use.

Just another unrealized opportunity of OTF, as a lot of T1 add-ons from the past that are discontinued now (MM, for instance).

A good bunch of those ligs did exist in the QuickDraw GX® version, now defunct as many things that are missing from OTF (that, anyway, in its PS flavour, is fully supported only by Adobe apps so far, in any case not by Microsoft). A pity!

Thus, it's not that much, as some seem to pretend, that those ligatures had a very particular and restricted use (which is true for most ligs, BTW) but rather, AFAIK, the fact that OTF is already rather poor (besides of Unicode support) and really poorly supported outside of InDesign® (even in Corel 12, one can't easily use real Small Caps, although the package claims to be Unicode-savvy and indeed is for foreign and exotic scripts, but not for ligs or other style refinements). Why not just having kept MM, GX and other possibilities in OT format? A mystery… The more as "OTF"extension may also refer to TT-flavoured fonts, where MS doesn't seem to have any problems!

Try to get a QuickDraw version of AvantGarde, thus! I had samples on a ten-year-old Linotype CD. Dunno if one can still buy the fonts.

Hope that helps (but of course the statement of good things disappearing with the latest technologies doesn't help at all — just makes you sad or even drives you crazy; anyway, me on my PC never could use QuickDraw, besides of reading the demo PDF into Acrobat Reader 3, turning the machine off, converting the remaining *.TMPs into something readable, implying their renaming, and eventually resizing, before recompiling all of that into a new OTF, a thing I never did, luckily, because I don't want to get into trouble with U.S. Justice <g>).

On the other hand, first part of the described method works, and who could blame you if you just want to retreive features of software you already paid for, sometimes a couple of times, and that no one would sell you any more, even if you'd pay lots of money? The more the roughly described method is tricky enough (the files in the temporary folder have totally arbitrary names, and you'll have to de-compile, text-edit and re-compile resulting fonts a couple of times) to make you merit the results of your work — almost like re-creating a font from scratch, implying a fairly good knowledge of PostScript® programming, BTW. Also BTW: other features disappeared with QuickDraw, as ornated drop caps for some fonts such as Linotype Didot ®. Anyway, other than Mac users never legally had them… And, last but not least, some ligatures don't even appear in Unicode (e.g. the very German(ic) "f-t" variants).

Regards,

Christoph


Disclaimer: I don't intend, in any way, or by any means whatsoever, to encourage software piracy. Anyway, contemporary PDFs usually don't contain any more but very restrained partial character sets, and with the newer software since Windows 95 and Acrobat Reader 4.x, the described method doesn't work that well any more. And, of course, turning your computer off pushing the "start" button may cause serious hardware hazard. Furthermore, the described method has only been and only partially tested on DOS/Windows-based systems and nothing else, and only by curiosity and never for any commercial-oriented use. Resulting font files may have very arbitrary scaling and aren't, of course, legally usable. All mentioned Trade Marks are property of their owners, even where I forgot to add the "®" sign.


P.S.: Big companies force us sometime to become "hackers" without even wanting it. Crazy, isn't it? And they open broad up the way to do that. They could secure their software as much as they want, I wouldn't mind, if only features that worked in the past still worked, and if they didn't make you pay sometimes twice, and often twice as much the second time, for things you already bought a couple of times, and of course, if those lost features were simply still available. Use of commercial software implies a certain degree of crazyness and/or (misplaced) altruism, even masochism (® or © <vbg>?) . I think it's better to use free software where you can without loss of quality and spend your money on more useful things, e.g. really altruist and humanitary works. But the most funny, maybe: some big foundries copy each others' fonts, sometimes just renaming them, and sell them for only a fraction of the initial price, or just giving them away for free. MS TT clones often don't contain any kerning information, but it's easy to add it using original AFM files' metrics. Of course, that would be illegal, too, as long as you don't rename the font family and pretend having re-built it scanning sample printouts (what, of course, almost no one really does). But if one pretends it, one will never have any trouble… URW has a lot of original font layout files, as they created the initial digital designs… and give them away for free, using different naming schemes! Fonts they sell, in the same time and in parallel, for lots of money, totally legally.

[Stephen Owades]

Originally Posted by Christoph

... A good bunch of those ligs did exist in the QuickDraw GX® version, now defunct as many things that are missing from OTF (that, anyway, in its PS flavour, is fully supported only by Adobe apps so far, in any case not by Microsoft). A pity!

Interestingly, I have found one strange situation in which a Microsoft application takes advantage of some of the advanced features--non-standard ligatures and contextual alternates--of PS-based OpenType fonts. On my Windows XP machine, if I specify a fancy Adobe OpenType font like Brioso Pro (a bonus for CS2 buyers) in Notepad (the most basic of text editors supplied with the OS), the text is displayed and printed using a range of ligatures and alternates. The ligature substitution is quite intelligent--the "sp" ligature will be used if the following letter is an "e," but not if it's an "i"--and letter pairs like "ll" or "dl" will show a shorter alternate glyph for the first character in the pair. I get what appears to be a ligature (but which may be a combination of alternate glyphs) for combination like "Th" as well as the expected "fi," "fl," "ff," and "ffi." There are also some letter-pairs that appear to be kerned, like "We," although "Te" is not. The basic ligature substitutions, at least, work with other Adobe OpenType fonts like Adobe Garamond Pro and Myriad Pro, but not with any of the TT-flavored OpenType fonts that I have available (like Times New Roman or Palatino Linotype).

I've been puzzling over this for some time, and I don't know whether the presence of DLLs from InDesign CS2 might be affecting how Notepad displays text. None of this stuff works with Microsoft Word or other more typographically-savvy Microsoft apps, or with QuarkXPress 6, by the way.