Kenneth Whistler had written:
Handwritten forms and arbitrary manuscript abbreviations should not be encoded as characters. The text should just be represented as "m" + "m". Then, if you wish to *render* such text in a font which mimics this style of handwriting and uses such abbreviations, then you would need the font to ligate "mm" sequences into a *glyph* showing an "m" with an overbar.
I had replied:
This will not work, as all 'mm' occurences are not written as m-overbar. [example snipped]
What I wanted to convey is that these abbreviations cannot be globally applied to a text, as they are governed by morphological issues (possibly also by typographical considerations, or may be just arbitrary, as Ken had suggested). So, they should be somehow coded in the text, whenever the user wants to preserve them, akin to the notorious "Wachstube" vs. "Wachſtube" example. A glyph- substitution automatism is not apt for this sort of happening. John Hudson wrote:
Ken's suggestion works fine, but only on discreetly selected runs of text. In other words, it would be up to the user *not* to apply the glyph substitution layout feature in the circumstances Otto describes.
[...] Obviously this is not a plain text solution: markup is required.
On the contrary, I think this is a text feature and not a mere rendering issue. Hence, I see two possible solutions: - mark the abbreviation with a particular character (or character sequence), e. g., U+006D U+0304 (abbr.) vs. U+006D U+006D (plain), or - mark the plain (unabbreviated) occurence of the characters, e. g., U+006D U+U+200B U+006D (plain) vs. U+006D U+006D (abbr.). I'd prefer the former one, because it marks the deviation from the prevalent usage. Best wishes, Otto Stolz
