https://bz.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=4638
--- Comment #27 from JC Ahangama <[email protected]> --- Where is 'fj' ligature? I think the 'renewed' interest in ligatures is because techies newly entering the field are catching up with Open Type (now Open Font) technology. Some are understandably confused. That ligatures are separate things outside letters was not an issue during letterpress days. Those days, the printer (as I was then) just composed the text including ligature types if the author required them and the reader saw them. (A type is a stamp of a letter. Anybody seen a typewriter?). I remember seeing those 'odd' ligatures like 'fj' in type cases. That was 1960s. The Open Type standard is an implementation of the Unicode Standard. At least for the Latin script, more correctly called Simple Script, you get numeric codes only for basic, alphabetic letters. The Latin Script in computer jargon means the set of numeric codes that were assigned first come first basis to Europeans starting with English. For instance, Icelanders requested and got the Old English letters like þ, ð, æ encoded into the single-byte code set. The term character was borrowed from Computer Science to mean basic letters, graphical shapes, spaces, some diacritics and so on that have their own publicly known numeric codes. Then people started requesting codes for ligatures. The 'f' ligatures of English were issued the first few slots in the Private User Area. It was only a stop gap measure until font makers understood how to make character substitution tables that point to glyphs of ligatures. Ligatures do not have publicly declared numeric codes. Instead, they have private codes declared within fonts. Ligatures are NOT characters. They are shapes representing joint letters or shapes of those transformed into their own unique shapes that the user of a particular script recognizes. Where does the 'fj' ligature go? It goes into a font made specifically to show the script of the language that has that ligature (Norwegian?). Just like the good old days of letterpress, fonts are for the author's purpose. -- You are receiving this mail because: You are on the CC list for the issue.
