John Jason Jordan wrote: > If you mean like Adobe InDesign does, no. If you mean can you use them, > yes. But using ligs in OOo is not automatic, you have to enter them > with Insert Special Character, or use the character insert shortcut and > code appropriate for your operating system. > > You can also macro it with successive search and replaces. Suppose, for > example, that you want to use just the standard f-ligs. You can type > the document without ligs, then record a macro that will search and > replace the characters with the lig character. You'd have to do ffi > first, then ffl, then fl, fi and finally ff. If you do (e.g.) fi first > it will replace the fi in office, which is part of the ffi lig. > > There are problems with the search and replace macro. First, it will > give your spell checker apoplexy. Second, You have to rerun the macro > every time you add or change any text. And third, if you turn on > hyphenation it will be messed up. On the other hand, until OOo supports > discretionary ligatures, using a macro is the only workaround.
You may be missing the point of what is being talked about. Many OpenType fonts now have ligatures (and often optional variant shapes for particular characters) in the fonts outside of the regular font table. These ligatures can be accessed and used in Adobe Indesign and probably some other advanced Desktop software, but cannot be used at all in Microsoft Word or OpenOffice or any other word processing program which I know about.
These ligatures (and variant shapes for some characters) are in addition to those available in Unicode and therefore not accessible through Special Characters, for example an fj ligature. Frachtur fonts in particular include a large number of ligatures not part of Unicode. The Unicode Consortium's take on this is that they will not add any of these ligatures to Unicode, that those ligatures currently in Unicode are only there for compatibility reasons and it is recommended that they should not be used—that the approach used by Indesign is the correct: that is, characters that can be ligatured are ligatured at a high level in the rendering process, not at the text level. So, for example, if you type “fjord”, spell-checking will still find the letters f j o r d whereas display and printing will use a single ligature for the “fj” (unless you override this).
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligature_(typography), though the suggestion that Unicode possibly considers æ and œ and ß among the characters that should not be used is just an example of the ignorant nonsense one finds so often in Wikipedia entries.
Note that if you use ligature characters the way you suggest, you will get a lot of spell check errors, because the dictionaries don’t know about “find” where the “fi” is spelt with the Unicode fi-ligature character as opposed to spelt with “fi” as two separate characters. Attempts to add words with ligature spelling to your dictionary will fail as OpenOffice.org considers the Unicode f- and s- ligature symbols to be separate words.
A large number of ligatures are absolutely necessary for some scripts, especially Hindu scripts. Arabic on the other hand requires a large number of variant shapes for letters which change depending on the letters position in the word. This automatic ligature and changing of shape in such scripts is supported by OpenOffice.org, at least in Windows, because it is supported by the operating System. But, so far as I know, none of the normally used computer operating systems support ligaturing for the Latin script. So the ligatures and variant shapes supplied in fonts for Latin characters remain inaccessible.
Jim Allan --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
