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I know XeTeX can easily turn on and off Linux Libertine's different sets of ligatures as described in the Manual for Linux Libertine with XeTeX, but is there a way to use the discretionary or the historical ligatures with pdfTeX? Is this just the point where pdfTeX can't keep up with XeTeX anymore?

The three sets of ligatures (standard and the two before-mentioned) as well as some examples of each are listed on page 8 of Libertine's German documentation for XeTeX, but I'd also be interested in a full list of each.

As a reference: The pdfTeX package for Linux Libertine is called libertine, it doesn't have a real documentation on CTAN, just a readme; another sort-of documentation doesn't mention any ligature-related feature. So I might be looking for a solution outside the range of the package? Is this possible with whatever font tables are installed with the package?

doncherry
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    I just want to say that this is a perfectly written question which itself offers answers to various possible, otherwise additional, questions by less experienced users. I am being a bit pathetic, but it was a pleasure reading it. – Harold Cavendish May 24 '11 at 19:06

1 Answers1

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The glyphs are accessible. E.g. you get the historical st like this:

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage{libertine}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

\begin{document}
{\libertineGlyph{uniFB06}}
\end{document}

But I don't think that the author of libertine did set up a family which uses this ligature, so you would have to generate tfm + fd-files and perhaps a suitable virtual font yourself.

Ulrike Fischer
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  • Great, that's a good start. In Libertine's German documentation for XeTeX, section 5.3.20 (page 87) I found something that looks like a complete list of the special (non-Unicode) ligatures (they use a "private" area in Unicode; the few Unicode typographic ligatures are in section 5.3.25). Is there an easy way to tell pdfTeX to replace e.g. every tt with {\libertineGlyph{t_t}}? The keywords "tfm + fd-files" and "virtual font" that you mentioned are nothing I have experience with, how could I get started with this? – doncherry May 24 '11 at 19:50
  • It definitely smells like, in the end, I'm gonna wanna use this great tweak of yours to make the ligatures searchable again, in this case e.g. with \pdfglyphtounicode{t_t}{E03C}. – doncherry May 24 '11 at 20:04
  • I learned a lot about TeX-fonts from the first edition of the LaTeX Graphics Companion. The chapter is not included in the print of the second edition but it is freely available: http://xml.web.cern.ch/XML/lgc2/tlgc2extra.pdf. The important section is 21.3. – Ulrike Fischer May 25 '11 at 07:38
  • The example in this answer no longer compiles with pdflatex as \libertineGlyph is undefined. It may be related to http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/78516/linux-libertine-package-and-fonts-not-working-anymore-fall-2012 , but I don't know how to fix up the answer. – Mohan Dec 09 '12 at 22:17
  • Also see http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/76305/how-does-libertine-type1-work?rq=1 which comes closer to an answer – Mohan Dec 09 '12 at 22:57
  • You also need to think about kerning information. It is not that hard to make glyphs available but if they are not part of what pdfTeX sees as a single font, you won't get kerning. At least, not without further work (and I'm not sure whether you could do this or not - but if you could, it would be horrible to do). The best way to do this (in the sense of giving the best results) is to set up tweaked encodings for either tfm fonts or virtual fonts. But it is fiddly to do even though e.g. fontinst is great. – cfr Nov 21 '13 at 04:15