"Adam Twardoch" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >It doesn't matter whether a ligature is "mandatory" or not. Ligatures should >not be encoded _at all_, and these encoded in the Alphabetic Presentation >Forms are an uncomfortable compromise, and exception.
I completely accept that the vast majority of ligatures can be decomposed into existing encoded characters without any loss of design integrity and therefore the case for encoding them is weak (and probably non-existent in the context of the new font technologies such as OpenType) But can someone explain to me why a ligatures such as ct which CANNOT be accurately decomposed into individual characters (at least, it can't if it's designed PROPERLY) shouldn't be encoded in its own right? Non-decomposability is the special feature of all the ligatures currently included in Alphabetic Presentation Forms. How about the German double s/eszett (U+017F) a ligature of long s and s which cannot be accurately built up from it's components. There was probably never any doubt that the eszett would be encoded since it appeared in codepages that predated Unicode but is the encoding of the eszett merely thought of as an "uncomfortable compromise"? There must be countless historical facsimile editions printed every year which use the st and ct ligature extensively. The production of these items would hugely benefit from having a fixed codepoint for "ct" instead of it wandering all over the PUA depending on what font you're using. I'd be happy if someone could point me to the exact Unicode 4 reference which deals with the issue of non-decomposable ligatures? Kevin
