Inkscape Community
Help Using Inkscape => Inkscape Beginners' Questions => Topic started by: eurogricer on September 13, 2018, 04:35:17 AM
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Good afternoon (UK time) to all!
My first post to this forum - although I've been using Inkscape for a while I can't claim in-depth knowledge, so please bear with me if his is a very simple problem.
First things first : I'm using Inkscape 0.92 on a Windows 10 laptop (version 1803 build 17134.228).
The problem, briefly, is that when I enter text in Calibri 12.5pt, certain letters (t, f, i) merge together and appear as a single character on the screen. When saved as WMF format and loaded into Word 2007 they appear distorted, with both letters displayed but the second one displaced to the right. The attached screen grabs will hopefully make this clearer - the first instance is from Inkscape and the second from Word. The letters concerned are the 'ff' in 'different' and the 'ti' in 'stations'.
The first thought is to use another font, of course, with Arial being a fairly obvious choice. Unfortunately the destination for my drawings is a publication over whose standards and production process I have no control. The font standard is Calibri 12.5 and the process is Inkscape - WMF - Word - PDF. Additionally, for some reason this process doesn't render lower case 'l' (L) correctly.
I've done a lot of experiments and a lot of searches but so far haven't come up with a viable solution that isn't ridiculously time consuming. Any help you wonderful people can offer would be greatly appreciated.
Dave
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Those are ligatures. The Calibri font as well as Inkscape support them. It looks like the WMF file format either does not support ligatures, or the program that you use to view the wmf does not support those in WMF. I would suggest to convert the text to a path before exporting to WMF, unless the text must stay editable in the WMF file. Before the conversion, make a copy of the SVG file, so you can still edit the original text.
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Welcome to the forum!
Is the Inkscape to WMF to Word to PDF routine needed for some reason? Because it's possible to go from Inkscape directly to PDF. Or from Inkscape to Scribus (an open source desktop publisher which supports SVG) (which I'm thinking possibly could avoid the WMF) and then to PDF.
Just a couple of thoughts, for what it's worth :)
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Thanks to both for your replies. I'm very grateful for your help.
Moini has in fact inadvertently solved it for me by introducing the word 'ligature' which I'd never heard of in the context of fonts. A bit of Googling turned up an old blog post on the subject, then some ferreting in Inkscape led me to Text and Font/Variants/Ligatures/Common. Untick the box, Apply and the problem goes away!
Many thanks
Dave
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Yeah, I've never heard of ligatures either. My brief research didn't explain it for me. I don't understand why it's a problem if 2 letters are touching each other.
I did know those settings were in the Text and Font dialog, but it was my understanding they weren't functional yet. Good to know they can be useful.
I'm glad you got the problem fixed :)
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Oh, I didn't know you wanted them removed, but rather to have them carry over into the other document. Yes, that will work, too :)