Bug 169873 - Drop cap adds incorrect right margin when letter is part of ligature
Summary: Drop cap adds incorrect right margin when letter is part of ligature
Status: NEW
Alias: None
Product: LibreOffice
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Writer (show other bugs)
Version:
(earliest affected)
24.8.0.3 release
Hardware: All Windows (All)
: medium normal
Assignee: Not Assigned
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks: Paragraph-Drop-Caps
  Show dependency treegraph
 
Reported: 2025-12-07 13:17 UTC by Govert
Modified: 2026-01-05 14:23 UTC (History)
1 user (show)

See Also:
Crash report or crash signature:


Attachments
An example of how the bug displays (2.90 KB, image/png)
2025-12-07 13:19 UTC, Govert
Details

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Description Govert 2025-12-07 13:17:45 UTC
Description:
Paragraphs that have a drop cap letter which is part of a ligature (for example, "Th" in Adobe Garamond Pro) will have an incorrect right margin applied to the first letter, leading to a lot of blank space.

It seems to already be occurring since about 24.8.0.3, according to this post: https://ask.libreoffice.org/t/drop-cap-on-letter-t-results-in-a-extra-blank-space-to-the-right/110216/8

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create a new document, set your font to Adobe Pro Garamond or another font that has a Ligature for "Th"
2. Enable drop caps
3. Type a paragraph starting with the word "The"
4. (Don't press enter, sometimes that makes the error disappear again)
5. If you edit the character style or paragraph style and edit the font features to disable Standard ligatures, the issue disappears.

Actual Results:
The T has a lot of right margin.

Expected Results:
The T has a normal amount of margin, just as if using a combination of letters that doesn't have a ligature (like "Tz")


Reproducible: Always


User Profile Reset: Yes

Additional Info:
Not that backspacing and typing the T again will make it look correct again, but saving the document or exporting as PDF reintroduces the error.
Comment 1 Govert 2025-12-07 13:19:01 UTC
Created attachment 204483 [details]
An example of how the bug displays
Comment 2 V Stuart Foote 2026-01-05 14:23:08 UTC
Confirmed. Using Times New Roman, a font with defined discretionary ligatures including the 'Th' non-Unicode. 

When the OTF 'dlig' feature for TNR is enabled, seems the width assigned to a 1 character drop takes the full width that the discretionary ligature would otherwise receive when active as a 2 char drop. The margin within the single char drop is set too wide.

Joined ligatures, with CGJ (U+034F) get ignored. 

=-testing-=

Version: 25.8.4.2 (X86_64)
Build ID: 290daaa01b999472f0c7a3890eb6a550fd74c6df
CPU threads: 28; OS: Windows 11 X86_64 (build 26200); UI render: Skia/Vulkan; VCL: win
Locale: en-US (en_US); UI: en-US
Calc: CL threaded