Re: Medievalist ligature character in the PUA

From: verdy_p (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Sat Dec 12 2009 - 12:09:43 CST

  • Next message: William_J_G Overington: "Re: Medievalist ligature character in the PUA"

    The ligatures are generated in this text using a template (documented in French here):
    http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Mod%C3%A8le:Ligat
    The template takes a pair of letters (or 3 letters) and attempts to detect a few of them that have precomposed
    versions in Unicode.

    If such precomposed ligatures exists, it generates two versions : one with ZWJ and the letters, one with the
    precomposed ligatures. Otherwise it just generates the version with ZWJ.

    When both versions are generated, one is made visible with CSS "display:inline", the other is made invisible with
    display:none (by default it will show the precomposed version, as it will work in most browsers and with most
    fonts). If you have an account on Wikisource, you can control which version you want to see in your browser by using
    your personal CSS stylesheet (documented in this page).

    I made this template some months ago after being asked how to make some medieval ligatures (including those that do
    not preexist in Unicode), and used it to convert this text.

    This can explain what you see...

    You can look at the wikisource of the pages by following the link to the paged version of the text where you can
    also compare it with the page scans

    Starting at page 1:

    http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Traitt%C3%A9_du_jeu_royal_des_%C3%A9chets_(Benjamin_Asperling_de_Rarogne).pdf/1

    wiki link:

    [[Page:Traitté du jeu royal des échets (Benjamin Asperling de Rarogne).pdf/1]]

    I wonder if there are ways to improve the rendering of ligatures.

    Note that some medieval ligatures will not work this way, we have a few ones that are approximates by some specific
    CSS code, such as "q" with an overstriking tilde, or "p" with a attached tilde/cedilla on the right: they are
    approximated by specific templates slightly moving some glyphs to kern them, because there's no Unicode to support
    them.

    For example in this other book:

    http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Du_Bellay_-_La_Deffence,_et_illustration_de_la_langue_francoyse.djvu/1

    wikilink:

    [[Page:Du Bellay - La Deffence, et illustration de la langue francoyse.djvu/1]]

    In this last example, here also the text is not fully corrected, only about 20 pages were converted to text, but the
    scans are complete. There are many more medieval ligatures in this text.

    But it was decided to *NOT* use any PUA for medieval ligatures. The best that can be generated with the current
    state of Unicode and CSS and fonts/browsers support is used (that's why templates are used that may be changed later
    to improve the encoding and rendering, if this becomes possible, without having to respell the texts completely).

    Philippe.

    > Message du 12/12/09 12:12
    > De : "William_J_G Overington"
    > A : "verdy_p"
    > Copie à : "Unicode Mailing List"
    > Objet : Re: Medievalist ligature character in the PUA
    >
    >
    > On Thursday 10 December 2009, verdy_p wrote:
    >
    > > If you want to see an example of
    > > texts with medieval ligatures requested by ZWJ (instead of
    > > using the legacy but too
    > > limtied preencoded compatibility ligatures, here is an
    > > example:
    > >
    > >
    http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Traitt%C3%A9_du_jeu_royal_des_%C3%A9chets_(Benjamin_Asperling_de_Rarogne)/Livre_Premie
    > > r
    >
    > Thank you for your post.
    >
    > The link did not work directly from the email, but by building it up in WordPad and then using copy and then
    pasting into the Firefox browser I managed to access the page.
    >
    > I copied some of the text from that page into WordPad and then formatted it at 24 point using my Quest Text font,
    which font has a wide glyph for ZWJ, the uses of ZWJ thus being displayed quite prominently.
    >
    > However, there was a strange phenomenon that, at the time of writing this post, I do not understand.
    >
    > For the long s t ligature there is the ZWJ version followed by the precomposed ligature for long s t.
    >
    > For the long s long s i ligature there is the ZWJ version followed by the ordinary letters without any use of ZWJ
    for long s long s i.
    >
    > For the long s long s ligature there is the ZWJ version followed by the ordinary letters without any use of ZWJ
    for long s long s.
    >
    > For the long s i ligature there is the ZWJ version followed by the ordinary letters without any use of ZWJ for
    long s i.
    >
    > For the ff ligature there is the ZWJ version followed by the precomposed ligature for ff.
    >
    > The Quest Text font is available as a free download from the following link.
    >
    > http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/QUESTTXT.TTF
    >
    > William Overington
    >
    > 12 December 2009
    >
    >
    >
    >
    >
    >

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