arabic ligatures in MS Word

[sylvain]

Hello,

I work on an Arabic font. The font has different sorts of ligatures so we wanted to assign them to the appropriate rlig, liga and dlig features (in MS VOLT).
(rlig for lam-alef, liga for yeh-noon.fina, yeh-reh.fina etc.. and dlig for teh-hah.init, noon-hah.init etc..)

This works great in inDesign ME and Mellel on Mac OSX but not on MS Word / win XP. Actually, Word seems to enable every Arabic liga feature by default, (including dlig) which is quite annoying, without giving the chance to disable them.

I tested the font on the beta version of office 2010 (on Win 7) which actually give access to the different liga features but it doesn't change anything.
I also have the same issue when using my font on Firefox. So I suppose this has to do with uniscribe?
But Microsoft seems to be aware of the different sorts of Arabic ligatures (http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otfntdev/arabicot/features.aspx) so why?

Has anyone already had this problem? Is there a way to avoid this?

Thank you very much.

Sylvain.

[Sergey Malkin (Microsoft)]

Yes, this is Uniscribe always applying 'dlig' feature for Arabic script. I do not remember why it started this way, but it seems to have some compatibility reasons. So you are out of luck.

You may try using stylistic sets for additional ligatures, instead of 'dlig'. This way they will still work through InDesign menus. But unfrotunately again, current Uniscribe does not allow applying custom features to Arabic text, so there will not be a way to enable your 'extra' ligatures in Word or Publisher.

Thanks,
Sergey

[sylvain]

Thank you Sergey,

I already considered changing the dlig to a stylistic set but I was still hoping for a better solution.

Is there any chance that this problem get fixed in a future version of Uniscribe?

Thanks.

Sylvain.

[Sergey Malkin (Microsoft)]

Sorry, I can't to make any promises on future Microsoft products. Especially in this case, where we have to maintain balance between features and backward compatibility.

Thanks,
Sergey

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