I'm working on a font, and I'm using Microsoft Volt to apply ligatures and OpenType features. I have a glyph for the word "the", but I only want it to apply if it's used as a standalone word. For example, I only want the ligature to kick in when I type the word "the" by itself. If I type "these" or "brother", I want it to revert to the "th" ligature (the way it's drawn, it looks weird with a letter after the "the" ligature). Is there any way to do this? I played around with the order of the ligatures, but nothing seems to work. I considered including the space glyph in the ligature, but then I'd have to type the space bar twice after every "the" and that would be stupid. Any ideas? Or does this require a different typographical feature other than <liga>?

Okay, but that's beside the point. Would you happen to know why the font shows up in programs as TTF even though I saved it as OTF? And would you also happen to know why my 3-character ligatures don't work right, even though I programmed it correctly?

I know that TTF is part of OpenType. My problem is that I want to save the font in .OTF format, but it always shows up as .TTF format in programs like Microsoft Word, where OpenType features only work with .OTF files.

I finished making a font on FontCreator, and I'm using Microsoft VOLT to add OpenType features. I added in all the ligatures, and the ff, fi, fl, and tt ligatures work (all the 2 character ones). However the three character ligatures will not work (ffi and ffl). Instead it shows the ff ligature plus the i or l separately. I tried installing the font to see, and it does the same thing in Photoshop. Now comes my second problem. The font won't save as .otf! Even though I save the format in VOLT as .otf, and even though Windows Explorer shows it as an "OpenType font file" (instead of "TrueType font file"), when I install the font, all my programs (Word, Photoshop, etc.) treat it as a TTF file, with the accompanied TTF logo next to the font name in the dropdown menu. Thus, ligatures will show on Photoshop (with the aforementioned ligature problem), but it won't work on Word since ligatures and old-style numerals only work with OTF. Does anyone know what's wrong and how to fix this?

Here's what my problem is. This is a screenshot from Microsoft Word.

I don't know if anyone else is having this problem, but on my computer, some fonts (Adobe Garamond Pro and Adobe Caslon Pro) are displaying the bold variant of the font as a separate selection on the dropdown menu in Microsoft Word and other programs. This can be really annoying, instead of just doing ctrl+b to get bold, I have to go the the drop-down and select a separate font. Does anyone know how to fix this or combine them into just one selection like all the other fonts? Or is this done intentionally for some reason?