2011/9/12 Werner LEMBERG <[email protected]> > > >> Consider the word `Dorfladen' (village shop). Using `=' to > >> indicate a compound break point and `-' for normal ones, the proper > >> break points are `Dorf=la-den' which means no `fl' ligature. Note > >> that `Fladen' means `cow dung', so having a ligature there is > >> really bad. > > > > But "Dorfladen" is not ambiguous. > > Yes, but some web browsers like Firefox automatically apply an `fl' > ligature... >
Well, not just Firefox, because Chrome is now doing the same thing for this message ! And unconditionally (ignoring the HTML page content language, if it's set to German). Chrome developers probably thought it was good because many English users demanded it. In the past, there was no automatic ligatures produced for fi, fl, ffi, ffl, ſt, and so on... Chrome should come back to the previous state on this, or apply ligatures only where they are hinted by ZWJ (support for ZWJ and ZWNJ was added in Chrome after my request in a bug report, nearly two years ago, so that they would no longer display a .notdef box). With the ligatures generated by default, now documents need to use ZWNJ instead if those ligatures are not suitable... But may be automatic ligatures may be kept on by default in English, or French, but not in German... And it would be desirable to have a standardized CSS property for controling this default behavior in browsers. -- Philippe.
