Andrew C. West <andrewcwest at alumni dot princeton dot edu> wrote: >> I suspect it would end when you start talking about combinations like >> qj and fþ that are unlikely to appear in natural language text. > > You should know better than to make rash statements like this on the > Unicode list ! > > I don't know about qj, but fþ is a not uncommon combination in Old > English, e.g. hæfþ (3rd person singular of the verb habban "to have").
Most of the fonts I see on a day-to-day basis have NO ligatures except fi and fl. Between that and the complete lack of support for ligatures in MS Word -- a program which really should know better -- I guess I don't think of ligatures being available to the common man (as opposed to professional typesetters) as much as I used to. When commonly available fonts don't even cover ffi, ffl, ft, and so forth, and commonly available Windows software can't used the ones that are there today, I imagine it might take some time before you start seeing precomposed ligature glyphs for qj and fþ. That said, I concede that major European languages should not be the sole determining factor for which ligatures are supported and which are not. I also concede that, as someone who is not a typographer or fontmaker, I probably shouldn't have jumped into this thread in the first place. Take it away, font guys. -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
