From: Jukka K. Korpela (jkorpela@cs.tut.fi)
Date: Wed Jun 01 2005 - 08:33:24 CDT
On Wed, 1 Jun 2005, Dominikus Scherkl wrote:
> > Pardon? In which sense is ligature processing _required_? Do
> > you mean that it is forbidden now to render "f" followed by
> > "i" as two letters, without using a ligature?
>
> _required_ not for latin, but for Arabic or Indian.
There are typographic requirements involving obligatory ligatures, and
they are reflect in the the Unicode standard, even in conformance
requirements. But these are conditional: _if_ an implementation supports
e.g. Arabic characters, then there are some rules on their shaping.
> So this problem solved, it is very easy to additionaly support the few
> handful of latin ligatures, isn't it?
Yes and no. First, an implementation need not support ligatures if it does
not support characters for which some ligatures are mandatory. Second,
presenting "fi" or "ffi" as ligatures is not mandatory; in practice it
should depend on a number of different considerations, including font
properties and cultural context. On the other hand, _if_ your
implementation supports both obligatory and optional ligatures e.g. for
Arabic, then it's surely easy to add handling of Latin ligatures.
-- Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
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