From: Kent Karlsson (kentk@md.chalmers.se)
Date: Wed Nov 06 2002 - 08:36:41 EST
> > Firstly, the claim that there must be no ligation over subword
> > boundaries is made only for German.
>
> It is also valid for Slovak and Czech.
ok.
I still wonder a bit why. It does not help the reader in
any significant way, esp. when many different words are
spelled the same quite regardless of ligation. Could it be
a heritage from Fraktur (where ligatures are used a lot)? Or
is/was it just as a convenience when setting text in metal,
so that it would be a bit easier for the typesetter (and
colleagues) to do hyphenation during or after the (initial)
typesetting? (Subword boundaries are likely hyphenation
points, whereas occurrences of ff, fi etc. elsewhere are
unlikely hyphenation points.) It would then be easy to
just put in a hyphen, without worrying about the letters
(or about their typeface; the hyphen would not vary much
with typeface). The latter reason should not apply to
digital typesetting, at least as long as one stays away
from the compatibility ligature characters but instead
letting the font do the ligation automatically.
Speculating
/Kent K
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