I was talking about purely typographic ligatures, in particular
ligatures used because the glyphs (normally spaced) would otherwise
overlap in an unpleasing manner. If the glyphs don't overlap (or
there is extra spacing, which is quite ugly in itself if used in
"normal" text), no need to use a (purely typographic) ligature.
So it is a font design issue. (And then there are also ornamental
typographic ligatures, like the st ligature, but those are outside
of what I was talking about here.) But of course, which pairs of
letters (or indeed also punctuation) are likely to occur adjacently
is language dependent.
/Kent K
Den 2011-09-09 23:45, skrev "Stephan Stiller" <sstil...@stanford.edu>:
> Pardon my asking, as this is not my specialty:
>
>> There are several other ligatures
>> that *should* be formed (automatically) by "run of the mill" fonts:
>> for instance the "fj" ligature, just to mention one that I find
>> particularly important (and that does not have a compatibility code
>> point).
>
> About the "should" - isn't this language-dependent? For example I recall
> that ordinary German print literature barely uses any ligatures at all
> these days (ie: I'm not talking about historical texts). And, has anyone
> ever attempted to catalogue such ligature practices? (Is this suitable
> for CLDR?)
>
> (I also recall being taken aback by the odd look of ligatures in many
> LaTeX-typeset English scientific documents, but I suspect that's rather
> because some of the commonly used fonts there are lacking in aesthetic
> design.)
>
> Stephan
>
>
