Re: ch ligature in a monospace font

From: John H. Jenkins <jenkins_at_apple.com>
Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2011 13:07:54 -0600

On 28 Jun, 2011, at 11:29 AM, Jean-François Colson wrote:

> * In the C’HWERTY layout on Linux, the digraph and trigraph had to be replaced by six PUA characters and an input method such as xim must be used to get the correct character sequences. Since they are PUA characters, those substitutions are not installed by default and the user has to add them him/herself in his/her ~/.XCompose file. I’ve made a bug report at Freedesktop.org to ask 6 new keysyms, but I don’t know when I’ll get an answer if I get one at all. If there were Unicode characters such as LJ Lj lj NJ Nj nj etc. for ch and c’h, such a problem wouldn’t occur.
>

Why do you need to process them as single characters? The typical way of handling these things is to use multiple characters, as is done in Welsh for "dd," "ff," and "ll" (among many other examples from many other languages). This is a well-known problem and with modern systems, there's no aspect of text processing that can't be handled this way. Keyboards can emit multiple characters with one keystroke, sorting can be tailored to account for multiple-character "letters," and so on.

> * Since those two letters must be encoded in 2 or 3 characters, with a monospace font, they are twice or 3 times larger than the other letters.
>
> To solve this last problem, would it be possible to make a font in which c ZWJ h would be displayed as a new glyph?
>

Yes, it's fairly trivial to do.

=====
井作恆
John H. Jenkins
jenkins_at_apple.com
Received on Tue Jun 28 2011 - 14:09:29 CDT

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