At 08:50 10/5/2001, William Overington wrote:
>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.
But the ligatures do not need to be encoded! I use ligatures everyday, and
one of the great blessings of Unicode fonts with intelligent glyph
substitution features -- e.g. OpenType -- is that I can use ligatures
without destroying my backing text and causing problems for sort and
search. We already have the best of both worlds, so why do you keep
insisting that we need a different solution that only solves half of the
problem that has already been solved?
Michael Everson has pointed out the mechanism that can be used if you
actually need to encode the ligating or non-ligating of specific characters
in plain text -- the zero-width-joiner /non-joiner. It is a solution that
relies on irregular font level support for rendering, but then so does your
solution, and letters that fail to ligate when you switch fonts is a better
result than .notdef boxes.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Type is something that you can pick up and hold in your hand.
- Harry Carter
