From: Dominikus Scherkl (lyratelle@gmx.de)
Date: Wed Jun 01 2005 - 15:20:08 CDT
>> The use of optional ligatures cannot be reasonably
>> decided on algorithmic grounds alone. Whether you use a ligature for
>> "fi"
>> or for "st" is a stylistic choice.
>
> One should note that every ligature can be given a semantic use,
> namely by quoting it directly, like in the sentence 'An example of a
> ligature is "Þ" [ligature fi]'. Perhaps textbooks in Arabic want to
> name those ligatures and different letter representations explicitly.
> Many glyphs can thus made into semantic objects, by simply
> objectifying them.
These are both causes for the existence of "grapheme joiner" and
"grapheme non-joiner", but not for the existence of precomposed
ligatures. If you realy require a ligature or require two characters
not to be ligated, use them. But in a smart rendering system this
would be very seldom nessessary.
And, ok, thousands of required ligatures was a litte extreme, but not
so far from reality if you take those of all supported languages into
account.
I don't expect a single font to support them all, but all I wanted to say
was: it is possible to support them, the technique already exists, and it
does not require precomposed ligatures as encoded characters. So
it should not be too hard to build a rendering system and fonts that
support the few ligatures used in languages using the latin script.
Best Regards
-- Dominikus Scherkl
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