On Wed, 20 May 2009 08:25:26 +1200 Michael Adams <[email protected]> dijo:
> On Wed, 20 May 2009 07:12:51 +1200 > Came this utterance formulated by Michael Adams to my mailbox: > > > On Tue, 19 May 2009 12:22:38 -0400 > > Came this utterance formulated by H.S. to my mailbox: > > > > > Just saw this over at slashdot: > > > "MS Word 2010 Takes On TeX" > > > http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/19/1556203 > > > > > > > > > I am not what is the status of ligatures and other advanced > > > typographic features in OOo, but at least till version 3.0, they > > > were not supported. I guess OOo better start working on it right > > > away to steal all the thunder and awe from this upcoming features in > > > MSO. If OOo beasts MSO in this, it would such a coup! > > > > > > Please correct me if I am wrong, I don't OOo supports ligatures and > > > glyphs at present without any kludges, does it? > > There are very few ligatures supported by Unicode. The issue is that > > text readers cannot decipher ligatures outside Unicode, this makes > > them unsuitable for the web. To be honest, very few people have any > > interest in ligatures these days. They were an advantage to the manual > > typesetter in that he could reduce the number of lead slugs required > > and increase the number of words per line occasionally. As to the > > aesthetics of them, [shrug]. > > I may have come across as a little harsh here; that was not my intent - > brevity sometimes does that. What i was meaning was that a majority of > people see no practical gain from ligatures, and in fact probably less > than 25% even know what they are. They are a cosmetic that can actually > be a problem in normal use. How do you spell check them? How many fonts > support them? I used to use ligatures when I was laying out books with InDesign. InDesign handles them by storing the the text internally without ligatures. Thus, if you copy and paste to another application that application gets the internal non-ligatured text. If you run the spell checker it checks the internal non-ligatured text. The ligatures appear on screen and are used in print and PDF output only. InDesign does this so elegantly that it can even adjust the ligatures for the requirements of hyphenation. Once I had the word "official" near the end of a line. Both hyphenation and ligatures were turned on as part of the paragraph style. Originally the word was the next to the last word in the line, so it appeared on screen with the ffi ligature. I needed to add a couple words to the beginning of the paragraph. When I added them the word broke at of-ficial. And InDesign cleverly started "ficial" on the next line using the "fi" lgiature for it. As for how many fonts have ligatures, all the Adobe Pro fonts do, at least the standard f-ligatures. And they are coded so that Adobe programs will use them as optional glyphs if the user turns on that feature for a paragraph or character style. The problem OOo is going to have is that it does not yet support OpenType fonts on Linux unless the font has TrueType outlines. All the Adobe OpenType fonts have Type 1 outlines. I have a number of them installed on my Linux computer and I can use them system wide with all applications except OOo. If OOo wants to add support for optional ligatures a la InDesign the developers are probably going to have to do some serious work on how fonts are handled first. As for the esthetics, I like them and I don't like them. It depends on what I am doing. If I am doing something that I want to give a somewhat retro look to I definitely want ligatures. For a more modern appearance the ligatures are less important. But having said that, it also depends on the font. If the font is designed with an "f" that curves downward a lot and ends in a big ball, it is going to look bad with an "i" jammed next to it. But if the "f" is designed with only a slight curve at the top and the curve ends smoothly, the "i" will look fine right next to it. To me there is no "one size fits all" answer to the esthetics issue. -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
