Re: Why Ligatures?

From: Patrick Perroud (pperroud@mail.club-internet.fr)
Date: Thu Oct 16 1997 - 01:10:02 EDT


Bernard Chester
>I guess I don't understand the reasoning behind having ligatures in a
>codepage. For example, Latin 00 proposal wants to add OE and oe
>ligatures to Latin-1.
>

OE/oe is not exactly a ligature but a kind of extra voyel used in French in
a word like "oeuf" (means "egg"). What is uselly called a ligature is
couple of character like "fl" or "fi". In such a case, when you reduce the
tracking between both characters, they join on the top looking like a
single character. Font manufacterer are providing a single character for
such pairs since decades and this is called a ligature.

>Aren't these cases that the display logic should handle, but the data
>actually is 2 letters? Is there a semantic difference if the display
>showed 2 characters? When I search for oe ligature code value,
>shouldn't I match with the octet pair o & e?
>

It should works but what happen when a text processor is handling both
single and double bytes characters? How do you know this one is ligature
and the other one is not?

Best regards

Patrick Perroud

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