>>Of course ligation control is font-specific. That is why the ZWJ solution is >>elegant -- it falls back gracefully to the two (or three...) unligated glyphs >>in the event the ligature is unavailable in the font. This is still better >>than displaying a black box, which is how William Overington's private-use >>characters would appear in most fonts, > >True. Encoding ligatures as characters is a bad thing. >
Indeed they would appear as a black box or something similar in most fonts. However, I feel that the availability of ligatured characters in a font at a specific official Unicode code point would be useful for the specific use of a person to be able to encode the ligature information directly, so that he or she may transcribe the typography of an eighteenth century printed book directly "metal type sort to unicode character" and print out the text. Now, I am happy to accept having seen the discussion is this thread that ligatured characters should not be used in many other applications because their use might interfere with sorting in databases and so on, but I do feel that the ligatured character facilities should be available for use in appropriate circumstances. I feel that as their usefulness was such that ligatured characters could be cast in some fonts in metal type right up until the end of the mainstream use of metal type, then it is reasonable that the use of such ligatured characters could be continued indefinitely into the future using unicode. There may well be uses in desktop publishing for the typesetting of various decorative items. As well as the matter of being able to transcribe documents on a "metal type sort to unicode character" basis both now and in the future, the fact of the matter is that there are many systems out there, such as Microsoft Office 97 running on Windows 95, that will continue to be in use for many years. As far as I know, Word 97 can only use ligatured characters such as ct if they are (1) encoded in a font and (2) the character is inserted into the document whenever required using Insert Symbol or using a short cut key set up from within Insert Symbol. I may be wrong on this and would be happy either to have this confirmed or corrected as the case may be, it is simply the only method of using such characters in Word 97 of which I am aware. I remember someone on this list using a phrase something like "the great tsu nami" (great tidal wave) to describe the attitude that is widely displayed by manufacturing industry that everybody is using the very latest equipment. The fact is that although some businesses may well have a major changeover, in many places if some new equipment is bought complete with new software then the older equipment is used elsewhere, so that there are then more computers available for use. Perhaps many people will have seen open access rooms in colleges where there are a number of newer machines and then gradually as one moves to the end of the room there are all sorts of older machines with older software being fully utilized by students preparing a paper. I would mention in passing, for completeness, the possibility of having a ct character as a bitmap and including that as a way of getting the symbol onto a printed page, though that would probably be rather awkward and perhaps only usable as a method of last resort. For example, there are some bitmaps available for such use at www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo though those bitmaps are for boxes rather than characters or ligatured characters and I have used such bitmaps for producing tick boxes on a printed form to good effect. However, I feel that there is scope for including characters such as a ct ligature in the presentation forms section, perhaps with a note that they are to be used only for specific purposes and not for others. The word deprecated would be inappropriate as in "deprecated at introduction" but surely some word such as "antique" or some descriptive yet not pejorative word could be used so that the characters could be made available without prejudicing the general policy of not using such characters in applications that would involve database sorting where the use of a ligatured character could cause sorting problems. Perhaps such characters could be termed "quaint characters" if that term is not already being used for some other meaning. The dictionary I have before me as I write defines the word quaint as an adjective with the meaning "interestingly old-fashioned or odd; curious; whimsical". A designating of certain characters as being quaint characters might perhaps be a way out of the problem and that thus ct and various long s ligatures could be defined as quaint characters such that they have unique official unicode positions yet are outside of regular usage where database sorting might be needed. Does that solve the problem of including them as presentation forms? William Overington 5 October 2001
