Hi Ivan,

I'll try to invovle some one for further look at this issue. As this should take time, will you consider the following workaround:

a. use the other fonts that support the ligatures feature well instead, such as Calibri, Segoe UI and so on.

b. If you have Microsoft Publisher installed, try edit the document with Publisher instead, as I know, Publisher do support ligatures well than Word.

Dear Max,

thank you for your response.

Yes, you are absolutely right, MS Publisher 2010 does represent all the ligatures correctly.

That is how a ligature is supposed to look like:

And this is what I have in MS Word 2010 when I try to type the same ligature:

As you see, the program fails to process the ligatures correctly.

Now, the problem is that Antinoou is quite a unique Unicode Coptic font. The other Unicode fonts you mentioned do not have all the characters I need for my work.

Therefore, I really hope you can find out what is wrong with the ligatures.

And one more thing that might turn out to be helpful.

Surprisingly, when I open the font properties, the ligature in the preview box is displayed correctly:

Yet it is not the case with how the text itself is displayed.

Dear MS Office TechCenter, because so many people use MS Word, this issue of the latest version (Word 2010) seeming not to support OpenType ligatures adequately would seem to be a serious one. The Unicode Coptic font "Antinoou" (which also contains Greek and Latin character sets) makes heavy use of ligatures because of the many combining characters involved in the Coptic writing system. Any word processor that does not render the ligatures correctly is of little use for working with Coptic text. Antinoou is rendered correctly (most of the time) by Word 2000 (which is what I still use) and by Word 2007 (according to what Ivan has told me). Why and how did this feature change in Word 2010?  --Stephen Emmel, Secretary of the International Association for Coptic Studies, Professor of Coptology, etc., 2012-10-15

Can you tell me who created the TTF for the Antinoou font you are using.  Open the TTF you are using and provide the Version number and a download link.

Also please provide a few alphabet letters you are having issues with Coptic Symbol Kai.. etc.

Also how are you inserting the characters via insert Symbols, code, ctrl keys, or a 3rd party app?

Can you tell me who created the TTF for the Antinoou font you are using.  Open the TTF you are using and provide the Version number and a download link.

Also please provide a few alphabet letters you are having issues with Coptic Symbol Kai.. etc.

Also how are you inserting the characters via insert Symbols, code, ctrl keys, or a 3rd part

Hello,

Apologies for the delay in responding back.

I have been researching this and doing some additional testing with different fonts.

Using the Greek and Coptic fonts from the Insert Symbol dialog also gives similar results depending on the font that I choose. For Example, using the Coptic letter shai [] + underdot with the Calibri font shows the characters much as you describe with the evertype font.  Times New Roman looks correct. But, I see the same results in Word 2007 using this method.

I noticed that if I changed the kerning of the characters, I was able to produce the desired outcome.

I do not have a solid answer for you regarding a workaround.

I will report this to development using the steps that you are using with the font and keyboard that you are using. They do not respond back to me directly. I can check the report periodically for updates.

You had also asked about asking questions for the Mac.

The link below takes you to the forum for Mac.

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/mac

Dear Risa,

Thanks for your reply. But a workaround is not what we want or need. Nor are results with other fonts and/or in other programs relevant here. Nor is this an issue of kerning, which has nothing to do with the ligatures as such. And method of input should also not be relevant to this problem. If Word 2010 correctly processes OpenType ligatures, then it should correctly process all the ligatures in the font Antinoou; if not, then not. Since the ligatures in Antinoou are not correctly processed by the current version of Word 2010, then there must be a bug somewhere in Word 2010's compliance with (Unicode and) OpenType, or so we suppose.

You might be interested to know that the ligatures in Antinoou are all correctly processed by OpenOffice's latest version of Writer for PC.

Thanks also for the link to the Mac site, which I will visit soon.

We users of Unicode Coptic will be grateful if you can do anything to facilitate solving this annoying problem in Word 2010.

-- Stephen Emmel, 2012-11-14

Hi,

I wanted to update you on this issue. I have been keeping track of it since I reported it. It looks it is being looked at. I do not have any additional information to provide. But I did want you to know that it is being reviewed.

Thanks,

Thanks, Risa, for letting us know that some wheels might still be turning on this matter. Something else that I have experienced in this same connection (rendering of ligatures) might be relevant here, although it is not an experience specifically with Word 2010, because I myself still use Word 2000 (on a PC running Windows XP Professional) for many purposes, and there I experience three strange phenomena when I use the Coptic Unicode font Antinoou (input method: Keyman Desktop Professional 8.0, but I do not believe that the method of input is of any relevance here):

1. The first strange thing is that the phenomena have changed from time to time over my years of use, despite my having made no overt changes to my system during the same period. I can only assume that some things that come along with automatic Windows updates have an effect on the way that Word 2000 renders Antinoous ligatures. For several months around winter 2011/12, the ligatures were not being rendered correctly at all (whereas before that winter, everything seemed to be running well). But sometime in 2012 things changed again. The following two features are phenomena that I am experiencing with Antinoou in Word 2000 currently.

2. Most often, a ligature is not rendered correctly at the moment of input, but then it does get rendered correctly when I save the file. I see the rendering change on the screen right before my eyes when I enter the command to save. Sometimes the correct rendering is triggered simply by my entering a hard return. I have not tried to discover all the details of this feature, simply being glad that the ligatures do mostly get rendered correctly sooner or later, except that . . .

3. Certain ligatures never get rendered correctly. Here too I have not tried to diagnose this feature systematically, but I have done enough testing to see that the differences in behavior have to do with the code-point range of the base characters: the ligatures that never get rendered correctly involve the Coptic characters that are a part of the Greek and Coptic block, namely 03E203EF (which became a part of the UCS before Unicode Version 4.1); the ligatures that do get rendered correctly involve the Coptic characters that are a part of the Coptic block 2C802CFF (which was added to the UCS in Unicode Version 4.1, and then slightly augmented sometime after Version 5.0). The code points of the combining characters do not seem to be a factor (note that five of the relevant combining characters have been added to the UCS after Version 5.0: 2CF2, 2CF3, FE24, FE25, and FE26; the other relevant combining characters have been in the UCS for a long time, namely 0300 etc. [see the list in a previous posting from me, above]).

-- Stephen Emmel, 2013-01-13

If a font  properly locates ligatures in the PUA and have GSUB tables to address them, they show practically anywhere but flaky in IE and Word. They have ligature support but System updates ruin them in IE. In Word, they can fix the problem by checking why the OpenType Ligature feature properly previewed in the Font dialog is not taken by the document. That should not be a hard bug to fix.

I have raised this issue since 2004. I think that the engineers at Microsoft do not fully understand ligatures. The ClearType set (Claibri etc.) have ligatures located at Alphabetic Presentation Forms area specially allocated to English ligatures. That is discouraged by Unicode because it could interfere with functions such as collation.

Try AbiWord. It has ligature support. It can be downloaded at http://sourceforge.net/

You can read more on this issue at

http://ahangama.com/msdn/

Thanks.

JC