Kerning or ligatures in Armenian Font

Posted by: MikeS

When I made an Armenian Unicode font using FontLab and Volt, the resulting kerning and ligatures worked fine in Mellel on the Mac, but had spotty results in Word on Windows. The results were the same whether we tested in Word 2003 or 2007 under Windows XP or Vista (4 combos).

The kerning would work sometimes, and not at others, and when it did work, the advance width did not operate, so the next letter after the kern pair was separated from the pair by the same distance as the amount of the kern. Also, the kerning that did not work in some contexts might straighten itself out if the document was saved, closed and then opened again. But this did not always work.

Some ligatures worked and some did not. And the ones that did would work in some contexts but not others. I could make letters with overbars substitute for the letter and overbar (abbreviation bar), but I could not get the mem/now ligature to work without its adding the extra space of the two letters to the text. This space was on the right side of the ligature after it formed.

Any ideas? Does Uniscribe control whether or not kerning or ligatures might work for any particular language, or are they both supported regarless of Unicode range? Is there a way to force the width to advance with the kerning so there is no extra white space left behind the kern pair?

Again, these problems did not occur in Volt or with the fonts used in Mellel on the Mac.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

MikeS