On Fri, 10 Oct 2008 10:17:45 -0400 Came this utterance fomulated by Douglas St.Clair to my mailbox:
> On Oct 10, 2008, at 12:15 AM, JC Ahangama wrote: > > > Hi, > > > > It is unfortunate that Open Office still does not support ligatures > > of simple scripts (English etc.) in ISO-8859-1 code space. > > > This is a touchy area for me. Good typesetting is an art. A properly > typeset page with using ligatures, ornaments, and with the letters in > each word properly kerned is a thing of beauty. I learned typesetting > using handset type. I learned to make ligatures and do kerning with a > file and thin spaces. A little bit of research brought me up to the play on this (hopefully). A quick look at Latin1 (ISO-8859-1)[1] shows few ligatures past the "&" which has been normalised into modern usage, "Æ", "æ" which i dont see used much beyond encyclopaedia, the german esszett and nordic thorn. Unicode will give better results[2]. As a bonus the XML of ODF is in UTF-8. So all you need is a good font and a few keyboard shortcuts and Bobs your uncle. Automatic ligatures are not what the average keyboard user desires. Remember the value of them was originally in the time saved typesetting a book, prettiness was secondary[3]. For many situations ie databases, unicode recommend againsts ligature use[4]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8859-1#ISO-8859-1 [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_precomposed_Latin_characters_in_Unicode http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typographical_ligature#Ligatures_in_Unicode_.28Latin-derived_alphabets.29 [3] http://ilovetypography.com/2007/09/09/decline-and-fall-of-the-ligature/ [4] http://unicode.org/faq/ligature_digraph.html#4 -- Michael All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well - Julian of Norwich 1342 - 1416 --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
