On Oct 11, 2008, at 7:16 AM, Michael Adams wrote:
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.
Philistine!! <grin> Heck I got by with RADIX50 more popularly known as
RAD50. It only had upper case, numerals, and a few punctuation marks,
and a floating character. In order to extend it the floating character
was generally defined as a shift which added lower case. You have to
admit it was limited but you could do what needed to be done with it.
When MS came along with DOS they intended their computers 'for
business use'. They added the full ASCII character set and graphics.
The graphics were bitmapped. Apple came along with the arrival of
Adobe and Postscript. They used Postscript Fonts and vector graphics.
Now from looking at a page printed on an Apple Laser printer and one
printed on a Laser printer with MS it was hard to see much improvement
from Apple. But scale the original (make it a poster not just letter
sized) and the bitmapped fonts and graphics from MS sucked.
The point is that if Open Office wants to allow the production of high
quality typeset pages then they need to support all the glyphs and
that would mean properly supporting ligatures, diacritical marks, etc
and supporting them means more than simply printing them. It means
minimally the spell checker needs to recognize words with those glyphs
embedded in them.
I have used Open Office for a couple of years but participated in
discussions on its features for a very short time. I don't know if
this has been asked and answered before. Please excuse my ignorance if
it has, but is the expansion of the feature set based on ad hoc
suggestions or is their a more global plan. For example is open office
a business tool i.e. MS's model which was practical and minimal or
more grand like Apple's? Is it planned to become more like PageMaker
or stay more like Word? Is it going to remain a tool thats good for
moderately large documents (50 pages) like Word or should it handle
large documents even sets of volumes with all the cross referencing
and indexing tools such a project requires?
Automatic ligatures are not what the average keyboard
user desires.
Automatic ligatures are nice but how would you implement them? Would
you simply recognize the letter trio/pair and replace them with the
ligatures glyph or would you recognize the word both with the codes
for all the letters are present as well as when the letter trio/pair
is replace by the ligature's code is the same word.
Remember the value of them was originally in the time saved
typesetting a book, prettiness was secondary[3].
I think they're pretty and that's that! <grin>
For many situations ie databases, unicode recommend againsts
ligature use[4].
The problem I expect is that if you use the code for the glyph instead
of recognizing the ligature for example and displaying the glyph for
the letter pair then data entry might get screwed up with some entries
having the ligature and others having the letter pair.
BTW I seem to remember Postscript Type 1 fonts are the most
comprehensive of the methods for creating typefaces. You can also
embed images in them just like Postscript pages. Yippe!
If Open Office were to fully support ligatures both automatically as
well as manually then if you consider the flexibility of Type 1 fonts
you can see that special rather complex glyphs can be constructed
locally which could save a lot of time for people at their computer
just like the ligatures did for the typesetter.
--
St. Doug, Tigger and Puppy in our memory.
Tir na nOg
Wilton, NH USA
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