[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >>>The bottom line is you don't need specific characters for >>>"oe" and "ij", etc. You just need a rendering engine that >>>understands when using a ligature is appropriate (same >>>as with "ss" in German, or "ff", "fl", etc. in English). >>> >>>Making these distinct characters was folly. >>> >>>But I digress. >>> >>> >>> > >Hi, > >typography considers it a gross error to use ligature characters (fl) if they >occur at the >boundary between word compounds. So either a rendering system has to be pretty >smart, or the >transmitted text needs to be able to represent the ligature as well as the >separate character. >This slightly resembles arabic languages where different glyphs are used for >the same character >at the beginning of a word, in the middle, or at the end. >Of course, most email writers are not concerned about these fine details, and >the company >behind the winows-#### charsets does not seem to understand kerning at all. > >Wolfgang Hamann > >
You're right! The rendering system does need to be pretty smart. Unfortunately, few of them are. But that's still no excuse to lobotomize character encodings. The least offensive of all solutions would have been to create a throw-away non-rendering character, like the non-break space, that says, "glue these two together as a ligature". It would waste a lot less of an already limited encoding space, too. -Philip
