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lower case "i" disappears when next to "j"

Open SustReal opened this issue 9 months ago • 4 comments

Hello

We noticed that the lower case “i” becomes visually invisible when it is next to a lower case “j” with a letter spacing of less than 20 (for example, in the German word “Minijob”). The “i” can still be found using the text search, but it is not visually perceptible. We encountered the problem in Adobe InDesign (on Mac, screenshot below) and could replicate it on LibreOffice (on Linux). It occurred with all different typefaces of Barlow 1.5 we tested.

Best regards, Marc

Image Barlow 1.5 i+j issue in InDesign

Image Barlow 1.5 i+j issue in LibreOffice

SustReal avatar Apr 08 '25 08:04 SustReal

There is an ij ligature which only has the j glyph in it. Which is obviously an error. It is a Standard Ligature and it is named i_j.liga.

In v1.422 the i_j.liga has both glyphs, but does not look any different. So you cannot even tell the substitution has happened.

Since Standard Ligatures are On by default, the work-around for v1.5 until this gets fixed is to turn-Off Standard Ligatures (liga).

kenmcd avatar Apr 09 '25 00:04 kenmcd

thanks for pointing this out, I will push out a fix to the 1.5 branch when I get a moment

jpt avatar Apr 09 '25 00:04 jpt

Hello, are there any updates on this issue, please? I really like using Barlow and I really appreciate your effort with creating and maintaining it and it would be awesome to have this fixed. Thank you.

im-vybiral avatar Aug 20 '25 12:08 im-vybiral

Hi @im-vybiral - sorry for the delay, I've been busier than expected improving the kern-on kerning models, there was quite a bit to clean up since moving over to kern-on as a platform. but it will make future expansions much easier. I think I will have some free time at the end of next week, and will try to push up all my changes then

jpt avatar Aug 21 '25 19:08 jpt