From: William_J_G Overington (wjgo_10009@btinternet.com)
Date: Tue Dec 08 2009 - 06:20:10 CST
On Monday, 7 December 2009, Andrew West <andrewcwest@gmail.com> wrote:
> I note that many fonts on my system, including quite
> a few
> fonts from Adobe and Microsoft, include a visible glyph for
> ZWJ, ZWNJ
> and other format characters, but at least on Windows
> operating systems
> the user will never see them under normal circumstances.
Well, I suppose it depends on what one regards as "normal circumstances", but I find that Alt 8205 in Microsoft WordPad running on Windows xp professional using either the Arial font or the Times New Roman font that arrived with Windows produces a visible glyph for ZWJ, namely what I think of as the Don Quixote Windmill glyph.
Yes, I imagine Don Quixote reading a book with a c, the windmill glyph and a t and imagining a ct ligature glyph being there.
Some readers might like a short movie in relation to Don Quixote.
It is linked as La Mancha in the following blog post.
http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2009/05/sunday_type_let.html
I wonder if Unicode will one day have a ZERO WIDTH ALTERNATE ONE and a ZERO WIDTH ALTERNATE TWO character so that one could request an alternate glyph, if available in the font being used, from a plain text file. Indeed if ZWA1 and ZWA2 are introduced, then cZWJtZWA2 could be the way to request a very swash alternate ct ligature glyph from a font using a plain text file.
As modern typography has some fonts with many swash alternates and swash alternate ligatures available, it would, in my opinion, be good if plain text were to include a way to request such features.
William Overington
8 December 2009
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