[Tex/LaTex] How to force use of a normal ‘s’ and how to suppress ligatures when using Gothic font

fontsligatures

I want to use a gothic font for some headings, but the 's' character looks more like a 'f' which makes it really hard to read at times. I know it's meant to look like that, but according to the Font Catalogue there should also be a normal 's' available.

But how do I force use of that 's' instead of the 'f'-looking 's'?

MWE:

\documentclass{standalone}

\usepackage{yfonts}

\begin{document}
\gothfamily
The quick fox jumps over the sleazy dog
\end{document}

enter image description here

But here's how it looks in the Font Catalogue (notice the 's' in 'jumps'):

enter image description here

Also, is there a way of preventing ligatures? I would like 'dog' to be written as 'd og' since it's a bit hard to read otherwise.

Best Answer

The gothic font by Yiannis Haralambous is meant to reproduce old German typography, which sported several ligatures. The problem of choosing between a long and a short s is quite difficult to solve automatically, because it's not simply context depending, but knowledge of word fragments is necessary when compound words are involved.

So the method for choosing between the two variants is manual: type s for a “long s” and s: for a short one.

If you need to avoid a ligature, add \/ between the letters (this will hinder hyphenation, though).

\documentclass[border=2]{standalone}

\usepackage{yfonts}

\begin{document}
\gothfamily
The quick fox jumps: over the sleazy d\/og
\end{document}

enter image description here

Depending on the situation, \kern0pt might be better than \/ (which adds the italic correction). For the ygoth font the problem is irrelevant, because only the en-dash and em-dash have a nonzero italic correction.

Just for information. The font defines ligatures for the pairs or triples

(short s)(long s) (short s)t (short s)(short s) (short s)(short s)i
ae
be ba bo
ch ck ct
da de do
ha he ho ij
ff fi fl ffi ffl
ll
pa pe po pp
qq qz
(long s)(long s) (long s)t (long s)z
oe
tz
va ve vu

The other ligatures are

s: for the short s
"a "e "o "u for the vowels with umlaut "s for the es-zet

enter image description here

Here's the test document:

\documentclass[border=8,varwidth]{standalone}

\usepackage{yfonts}

\begin{document}
\gothfamily

s:s s:t s:s s:si\par
ae\par
be ba bo\par 
ch ck ct\par
da de do\par
ha he ho ij\par
ff fi fl ffi ffl\par
ll\par
pa pe po pp\par
qq qz\par
ss st sz\par
oe\par
tz\par
va ve vu\par
"a "e "o "u "s

\end{document}
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