On Sat, 11 Oct 2008 09:11:46 -0400 Came this utterance fomulated by Douglas St.Clair to my mailbox:
> > 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 think Scribus is trying to become this more than OO.o, or Docbook or LaTeX is. Historically a word processor processes words. These words are then made available to print houses with expensive DTP programs that format the text just-so. The gap has closed somewhat but feature creep has to be balanced against bloat somewhere. > 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? Requests for Features and Enhancements (RFE's) are handled by the same software and website that handles bugs[i]. Accepted Features require knowledge (to write), sufficient votes, programmer input (to get it written) and integration (often between several diferrent crews doing several different jobs around and within the program. OO.o has a roadmap of features it intends to integrate over time[ii]. > > 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. They are a product of the program and a good font. IIUC most ligatures are expected to fall outside Unicode[iii]. Unicode just sees them as the character pairs or triplets. > > 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. Yeah, you've got it. As each letter corresponds to a number, sorting is generally easy. Throw in a number for an obscure glyph which represents two letters and sorting gets thrown off beam. Now copy and paste your word into calc, is it meant to handle them? Then throw it into an external database like MySQL, we know it won't handle them. > 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! Postscript is Apples baby, they tend to hold their babies pretty close. OpenType may be a better format[iv]. Must admit, i'm getting into another grey area here. > 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. Hmm, never tried to write a font. Apparently hundreds of hours are involved in writing a good one, what with Latin with accents, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew all taking precedence over ligatures. Whipping up a quick glyph for an ameteur like me (even though i understand some vector graphic principles and know what an x height, descender, and em space mean) is probably beyond me. I did however do a 8byte bitmap font glyph or two on my Vic20 with its 5kB RAM twenty something years back - boring as stink. If anyone is serious about this, you are probably looking to dedicated publishing software, don't punish yourself with TeX though, LaTeX[5] is sexier ;) Cheers and good luck. [i] http://qa.openoffice.org/ http://qa.openoffice.org/ooQAReloaded/Docs/QA-Reloaded-HowToStart.html [ii] http://development.openoffice.org/releases/ooo_roadmap.pdf http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Features [iii] http://unicode.org/faq/ligature_digraph.html#2 [iv] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typographical_ligature#Computer_typesetting [v] http://www.latex-project.org/ -- 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]
