Re: ct, fj and blackletter ligatures

From: Thomas Lotze (thomas.lotze@uni-jena.de)
Date: Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:24:06 EST

  • Next message: Thomas Lotze: "Re: ct, fj and blackletter ligatures"

    On Sat, 2 Nov 2002 07:18:43 -0000
    "William Overington" <WOverington@ngo.globalnet.co.uk> wrote:

    > In relation to regular Unicode the policy is that no more ligatures
    > are to be encoded. My own view is that this should change. However,
    > that is unlikely to do so.

    I agree with you. Ligatures may have semantics that can be composed from
    characters already Unicode encoded, but they are separate glyphs whose
    shape cannot be inferred from that of others but has to be designed
    separately and stored somewhere in a font.

    > http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/golden.htm

    Thanks, I'll look at that.

    > There seems to be a lot
    > of theoretical possibilities for doing ligatures with Unicode fonts
    > using advanced font technology using the latest computers,

    That's something I don't understand; in fact I wondered about this
    before when I read Dominikus' posting where he says "It's up to a font
    (or display renderer) to ligate characters."

    After all, it's the typographer's decision whether to use a ligature in
    a given circumstance; using ligatures is not as simple as blindly
    replacing all occurrences of a character sequence by the ligature. So, a
    font cannot possibly be made repsonsible for ligature handling since it
    doesn't know where to use a ligature; that knowledge can only reside
    within the typeset document. The font can only contain the glyph shape
    of the ligature, to be used where the typographer thinks it's
    appropriate.

    > Indeed, it seems more likely that one
    > would need to use a Fraktur font with ligatures encoded with a code
    > number below 255,

    Why below 255?

    Thank you for your interesting response.

    Cheers, Thomas

    -- 
    Thomas Lotze
    thomas.lotze@gmx.net                      http://www.thomas-lotze.de/
    


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