Re: Ligatures (qj)

From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Tue Mar 11 2003 - 12:20:55 EST

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    At 04:25 AM 3/11/2003, Pim Blokland wrote:

    >I thought this was the graphics system's task, not the
    >application's. I mean, am I not supposes to be able to simply write
    >DrawString('olijfhofje') in my program and have QuickDraw do what it
    >takes to ligaturize it all?

    I should have written system or application. Some applications, e.g.
    Adobe's contain their own layout and graphics engines, other applications
    make use of system resources. From your comments, I take it you are a Mac
    user, so your situation is more complicated still: some apps, like Adobe's,
    are centered on OpenType technology, others make use of system resources
    centered on AAT (Apple's font technology, formerly GX). The former is,
    currently, limited to Adobe apps on the Mac, but there are lots of OT fonts
    now available; the latter is system wide, but there are almost no AAT fonts
    available.

    >And in that case, it doesn't really matter if the font contains PUA
    >codepoints or not. Provided the font's ligature tables are OK, it's
    >just as legal to have an fj at, say, U+E70B, as it is to have an fi
    >at U+FB01.
    >As long as you don't actually put a 0xE70B character in your text.

    If you don't intend to use the PUA codepoint in text, there really is no
    point in having it at all.

    John Hudson

    Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
    Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com

    It is necessary that by all means and cunning,
    the cursed owners of books should be persuaded
    to make them available to us, either by argument
    or by force. - Michael Apostolis, 1467



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