The mysterious fi-ligatures of Nexa. Do they really exist?

[Proximanova]

Nexa is a very mysterious font when it comes to ligatures. On the one hand, the font’s display page clearly shows the presence of the fi-ligature. Here, the bar of the ‘f’ is connected to the ‘i’, but the dot of the ‘i’ is not covered by the hook of the ‘f’.

But, out of all the samples of Nexa I have, not one of them has any ligatures, neither at the usual place (U+FB01), nor anywhere else in the file. I have downloaded the font from multiple sources, and not a single ligature is to be found in even one file or weight. Attached below is a screenshot from FontForge. It is clear that the two glyphs are unconnected.

The exceptions are the Demo fonts (Light and Bold), which have a different type of fi-ligature altogether, where the hook of the ‘f’ covers up the dot of the ‘i’, as seen in the picture below.

This is also demonstrated in this demo picture.

What’s the deal with these ligatures? How is it that the foundry clearly shows the presence of ligatures, but the font files do not have them? Does anyone, by any chance, have the Nexa font files with ligatures? (Of course, I’m not asking for the files themselves to be uploaded, as that’s piracy. I only want to confirm the presence of the ligatures, for which a screenshot in a font editor will do.)

Thanks!

[Ralf Herrmann]

I just had a quick look on MyFonts and don’t see anything suspicious. The glyph palette shows the ligatures at the typical places and the ligatures can be accessed via OpenType.

With ligatures turned on:

download at MyFonts

With ligatures turned off:

download at MyFonts

 

[Ralf Herrmann]

And something completely different: I noticed that your image uploads cause problems with our thumbnail system. So I have two request:

1. Can you please tell me how you currently add images to your posts so I can investigate what the problem is?

2. Can you please for the time being use the standard method of uploading files, which is to use the attachment feature in the editor, where is say “Drag files here to attach or choose files”. 

[Proximanova]

37 minutes ago, Ralf Herrmann said:

And something completely different: I noticed that your image uploads cause problems with our thumbnail system. So I have two request:

1. Can you please tell me how you currently add images to your posts so I can investigate what the problem is?

2. Can you please for the time being use the standard method of uploading files, which is to use the attachment feature in the editor, where is say “Drag files here to attach or choose files”. 

The images are uploaded on imgbb.com, so most likely that is causing the problem. I use it to circumvent the 20MB restriction of image storage available to a user.

 

39 minutes ago, Ralf Herrmann said:

I just had a quick look on MyFonts and don’t see anything suspicious. The glyph palette shows the ligatures at the typical places and the ligatures can be accessed via OpenType.

In all likelihood it is only the web version of Nexa (on MyFonts and FontFabric) that seems to show the ligatures, as the desktop OTF/TTF files do not have them (nor do the WOFF/WOFF2 files on examination with FontForge).

[Riccardo Sartori]

2 hours ago, Proximanova said:

How is it that the foundry clearly shows the presence of ligatures, but the font files do not have them?

Different versions of the fonts could have different features, either because of subsequent improvements in the design or to increase the appeal of the paid version over the free version.

It’s also worth nothing that U+FB01 and U+FB02 are legacy characters in Unicode, added for backward compatibility. Any font could have f_i and f_l ligatures resolved via the appropriate OpenType feature without having glyphs showing up at those codepoints.

[Riccardo Sartori]

I downloaded the files now offered at fontfabric.com, and this is how they appear in InDesign: