Use Advanced Font Ligatures in Office 2010

Heres a quick look at these new font features in Office 2010.

It also includes the new font Gabriola, which includes an incredible number of beautiful stylistic sets and ligatures.

This includes support for OpenType ligatures, stylistic sets, number forms, contextual alternative characters, and more.

Here we have Word 2010 in Windows 7 with some random text in the Gabriola font.

tap the arrow on the bottom of the Font section of the ribbon to bring up the font properties.

Alternately, pick the text and click Font.

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Now, hit the Advanced tab to see the OpenType features.

you could change the ligatures setting…

Choose Proportional or Tabular number spacing…

And even select Lining or Old-style number forms.

Heres a comparison of Lining and Old-style number forms in Word 2010 with the Calibri font.

Finally, you could choose various Stylistic sets for your font.

The dialog always shows 20 styles, whether or not your font includes that many.

Most include only 1 or 2; Gabriola includes 6.

Heres lorem ipsum text, using the Gabriola font with Stylistic set 6.

The font ligatures change based on context, so they will automatically change as you are typing.

Watch the transition as we typed the word Microsoft in Word with Gabriola stylistic set 6.

Heres another example, showing the fi and tt ligatures in Calibri.

These effects work great in Word 2010 in XP, too.

It will, of course, display perfectly if the recipient is using Outlook 2010.

Using advanced typography in Publisher 2010

Publisher 2010 includes the same advanced font features.

This is especially nice for those using Publisher for professional layout and design.

This font options dialog is actually more advanced than Words font options.

you’re free to preview your font changes on sample text right in the properties box.

you might also choose to add or remove a swash from your characters.

From designing elegant headers to using old-style numbers, these features are very useful and fun.