Where are the advanced typography features such as ligature, glyphs, and more?

Talk about Pixelmator Pro, share tips & tricks, tutorials, and other resources.
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2018-02-08 11:19:17

Hello!

I read here that Pixelmator Pro allows me to
"take advantage of advanced typography features such as ligature, glyphs, and more"
... and I bought a beautiful OpenType font with "over 330 glyphs, alternative characters such as Stylistic Alternates, Stylistic Set, and Swash variant..."

... but I can't find anywhere in Pixelmator how to make these advanced features show up! . Not in th Text panel, not in a right-click. Doesn't Pixelmator handle OpenType (which advanced typography font format, then)? Is it hidden somewhere in a submenu?

Any help would be very appreciated! :blush:

In short: HELP!

Nicolas
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2018-02-08 11:47:10

Hi Nicolas, the general steps for this are as follows:

1. Choose Format > Font > Show Fonts
2. Click the Action pop-up menu (gear icon) in the Fonts window and choose Typography...
3. Highlight the text you'd like to customize
4. Choose an option from the Typography window for the selected character(s)
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2018-02-08 13:12:45

THANK YOU for helping me, Andrius, I really appreciate it.

It really seems like the right (and windy!) way to do it but, unfortunately, it doesn't work for me. :confounded:

All I am getting is an list of anonymous options (Other 1, Other 2, Other 3...) - see attached pic - and none of them do anything else (after I selected the letter I want to change) than modifying the spacing between letters... May be a buggy thing, since the last item of the menu is not even showing entirely.

I am a total beginner with fonts, but the should be an easier way to get alternative characters and other advance features!

Image
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2018-02-08 13:24:26

Hmm, that's odd — could you check whether the same steps work in, for example, the Pages app?
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2018-02-08 13:40:07

Great: it works in Pages! :blush:

... meaning it could be a problem with Pixelmator Pro? (I didn't try with Pixelmator non-Pro I have on my older desktop).

Anyway, thanks for having told me how to do it!
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2018-02-08 13:43:01

Yeah, that does mean it could be a potential bug with Pixelmator Pro. I tried with the default Zapfino font, which has glyphs and ligatures, and it worked for me but could you possibly share the font with us at support@pixelmator.com? We'd test it out and see what could be going wrong.
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2020-08-18 17:40:41

This doesn't work for me either with the latest Pixelmator Pro. I'm using Zapfino and the plain "Type" tool or Insert->Text from the menubar. Changing a glyph causes the Caret to move if the new glyph is wider, but it never displays the selected glyph.
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2020-08-21 09:44:08

This is a bug in the current version — we're working on a fix for the next update! 🙏
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2020-08-26 15:37:47

Thanks! Picking a Glyph variant is working now for Zapfino. But changing it using "Stylistic Variants" still doesn't work. For Zapfino, stylistic and glyph variants seem to be the same thing.

Also not working is the "Ornaments" checkbox. Try it out in the textedit app to see examples of ornaments.
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2020-08-27 14:28:54

Yep, we'll look into this!
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2021-01-20 18:49:46

This maybe something everyone already knows, but for those that don't, the text has to be lowercase for the glyph options to show up.
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2023-12-23 01:35:38

Hello, I am on the latest of Pixelmator Pro (Dec 2023).
When I select the glyth for the currently selected text (either the block or the chars) the screen flashes and nothing happens.
Selecting it three times makes the character change in the typography UI but not in Pixelmator.

I successfully used this open font in PP before so this appears to be new (bad) behavior. What do I do?