At 12:26 AM -0800 3/16/06, Mark D Lew wrote:
On Mar 15, 2006, at 8:59 PM, John Howell wrote:
OK, I need to ask what you specifically mean by ligatures. The
reason is that I'm currently teaching an Early Music Lit course,
and my students are transcribing a 15th century chanson that
contains a number of ligatures. In fact early music notation is
filled with ligatures up through and including the 16th century. I
have a strange feeling that this isn't what you mean!
The word "ligature" has various meanings in various context.
Here they are talking about a special font character made to combine
two letters. In this example, when an "f" comes before an "i",
instead of choosing the glyphs for those two letters and juxtaposing
them, the software chooses a special single glyph which combines the
two.
The "fi" pair is a common one for ligatures. because in many fonts
the hook of the "f" hangs over right to where the dot of the "i"
would be. If the letters are set close, the hook and the dot
collide and it looks ugly, but if the letters are pushed far enough
so there is no collision then there's two much space between the
stems of the letters and it looks bad. Therefore, a special
ligature is designed, in which the cross-bar of the "f" is
tastefully connected to the top of the "i", the dot is omitted, and
the hook is drawn slightly differently so as to suggest a dot.
mdl
Thank you Mark; very clear now. I felt as if I had encountered the
Queen in Wonderland! Too much time spent explaining Franconian
notation, I guess.
John
--
John & Susie Howell
Virginia Tech Department of Music
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
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