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” (uinless
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 spellcheck 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 deping 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
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