At 12:22 PM 7/17/02 -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >On 07/09/2002 03:20:22 AM Asmus Freytag wrote: > >[I'm coming late into the discussion; apologies if this ground has already >been covered.] > > > >OK. Here we go again. There is simply no way that one can >'typographically' > >ligate standard German without text (!) based control... > >I wonder if language/writing system-dependent control isn't appropriate in >the case of German as well as, e.g., Turkish. For instance, in an OT font, >have default lookups to form ligatures, and then have rules specific to >German, just as one would for Turkish, that do not form liguatures by >default. In the case of Turkish, the reason for the default being not to >form ligatures has to do with the use of both dotted and dotless i. In the >case of German, the reason is different: it's not done by default since it >isn't appropriate for it to be done everywhere, and the contexts in which >it is appropriate can't realistically be captured in a font.
Good. That's the key point. > The German >support in the font could still include the rlig lookups John has >suggested; and an intelligent app might even activate ligatures >automatically (like the SHY analogy Asmus mentioned) either by setting an >appropriate feature over the appropriate contexts or by inserting ZWJ into >strings at rendering time. NO.NO.NO. German has default ligatures that are *prohbited* at certain locations, but fine for all other instances. Therefore, using zw*N*j works fine out of the box - as long as the rendering system renders it invisibly. <f , zwnj , i> should never ligate anyway, even with current fonts, so any rendering system that passes the zwnj to a font, gets the glyph for it (and therefore gets the normal glyphs for f and i as a result, not the ligature for <f , i>) and then ignores the glyph for the zwnj would work fine. [If the renderer removes the zwnj from the string before glyph lookup, the result will be an unintended ligature, of course]. Anyway, it's the *non*-joiner, not the joiner we are talking about here. A./
