This is one of the weirdest questions I think I’ve ever asked on a forum, but here goes…
I have the word “Thomas” and I want to underline just the “T” (not the rest of the word). This is apparently impossible? When I select the “T” and hit Cmd-U it underlines the “Th” instead, and thereafter the “Th” is treated as a single character instead of two characters (e.g. when I select it or advance the insertion point over it).
Is an underlined “Th” some kind of special character about which I’m completely ignorant? Or is this a bug?
I mean, it’s not an Earth-shattering problem or anything, but it’s kinda bizarre.
Mark’s explanation of ligatures sounds correct. On OS X, certain combinations of letters in certain fonts will become a single letter internally. However, they should still act like two separate letters, so underlining one should really break the ligature. It sounds as though you have found a bug either with the font or with OS X in that regard (I know that sounds like passing the buck, but Scrivener just uses the standard OS X text system and has no code touching anything that low-level).
To test the theory, select the word and go to Format > Font > Ligature > Use None. Then try underlining just the “T” again. If it works, then it’s definitely a ligature issue.
Glad that helped! And I can reproduce it in TextEdit with Garamond Premier Pro, too. If you select the text and switch to a different font, the problem goes away, so it seems that it is just a drawing bug. It only affects programs using the standard OS X text system, too - you can see the bug in TextEdit and Nisus Writer (which both use Apple’s NSText system), but not in Pages or Word (which don’t). Normally you shouldn’t have to worry about ligatures at all, so this is definitely a glitch.
I’ve reported the bug to Apple (it’s in their system as bug ID #13899951). It may not be a bug on their side but a bug in Adobe’s font reporting the wrong metrics when using ligatures, but it seems strange that non NSText-based systems don’t have a problem with it.
I use Adobe Garamond Pro all the time too, and like the ligatures. But I also notice that if I have the spell check turned on, any word with a ligature at the beginning or somewhere in the middle, the rest of the word after the ligature is marked as mis-spelled.
And as you say, Keith, that is the case in both Scrivener and NWP.
When I select the “T” and hit Cmd-U it underlines the “Th” instead, and thereafter the “Th” is treated as a single character instead of two characters (e.g. when I select it or advance the insertion point over it).
