Mac Spellchecker flags ligatures fi and fl as wrong

[withoutFeathers]

Hi,
This seems like an obvious bug (or, if you prefer, negative feature).

Detail:
What I did:
I replaced the 'fi' and fl' in a common font (New Century Schoolbook) with the fl and fi ligatures for that font. I did so after the fact, by search and replace, since the text was already written without ligatures.

What happens:
Now the 'Check spelling while you type' flags all those words as incorrectly spelled.

Other info:

1) Nisus, however, correctly find these words using the find function -- but only if I use 'ignore case', which is odd. It means Nisus is considering the ligatures as a 'case change'. But at least it is aware of what they are. Apple no.

2) Nisus "Ligature" on the Format menu appears to have no effect on this. Or even on making ligatures. They don't get made even if I check 'use all'. (And I only want to use one of them--fl, not fi--anyway, so I'd have to do it manually even if this worked).

Anyone know a way around this, especially the Apple spell-check one of flagging them all?

Thanks....

WF



Mac OS 10.6.8
Nisus WP 2.0.7

[useeger]

Perhaps it is a font problem that the Nisus ligature feature does not work. I have the opposite problem, it works although I don't want ligatures. I don't want ligatures because if I create a pdf of a Nisus document with ligatures Apple's Preview does not find words with ligatures. That's obviously a problem of MacOS X, not a problem of Nisus. So before creating a pdf I always make a "Select All" and after that choose the menu command Format > Ligature > Use None. Else the pdf-document would not be searchable with Preview.

[withoutFeathers]

Perhaps it is a font problem that the Nisus ligature feature does not work. I have the opposite problem, it works although I don't want ligatures. I don't want ligatures because if I create a pdf of a Nisus document with ligatures Apple's Preview does not find words with ligatures.

Interesting.
And I realized I didn't really know how well I liked the ligatures, reading them, relative to non-ligatures.

So I set up the best 'blind' test I could on short notice -- 50 pages of text, 30 instances of each of fl and fl-ligature randomly placed while I wasn't looking at the file, and then I read the text to see which ones stood out for me and which ones didn't. My goal was that none would stand out (in other words, that I wouldn't notice them, and just continue reading the text).

I discovered that the ligatures stood out about 20% more often than the nons.

So combining this with the spelling problem, it's a no-brainer: no ligatures.

WF