From: John Hudson (john@tiro.ca)
Date: Thu Jan 25 2007 - 21:22:47 CST
Asmus Freytag wrote:
>> In Latin typography, ligature formation is largely a matter of
>> stylistic preference. Stylistic preferences do not belong in plain text.
> In some styles, ligature formation is subject to additional rules that
> are then no longer a stylistic preference. The most widely know, if only
> historically relevant, of these is Fraktur (which is encoded in the
> Latin script). In Fraktur style, and probably dependent on the language,
> there are a number of ligatures that are essentially mandatory, such as
> 'ch' for Fraktur texts in German, and others, such as 'st' that are
> mandatory in some words, and prohibited in others.
> Once you decide to use Fraktur, ligatures become part of your
> orthography.
Right, but deciding to use fraktur is itself a stylistic preference. I'm not sure that
going through a text that one has decided to set in fraktur -- or which might possible be
displayed in Fraktur -- and inserting ZWJ everywhere one wanted ligation to occure and/or
ZWNJ everywhere one didn't want it is a sensible way to enable the orthographic impact of
this deicision.
The sad fact is that there is no standard layout model for fraktur, nothing to say how a
fraktur font should operate or how application of layout features in fraktur fonts should
be handled. There isn't even any way to signal to an application or layout engine that a
given font is fraktur.
John Hudson
-- Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC john@tiro.ca Marie Antoinette was a woman whose core values were chocolate, sex, love, nature and Japanese ceramics. Frankly, there are worse principles of government than that. - Karen Burshtein
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