Re: ZWJ and Latin Ligatures

From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Thu Jul 04 2002 - 13:10:36 EDT


At 18:41 7/2/2002, John H. Jenkins wrote:

>Alas, but that's technically impossible. Both OT and AAT (I'm not sure
>about Graphite) require that single characters map to single glyphs, which
>are then processed. (In OT, of course, you are also supposed to do some
>preprocessing in character space, but that doesn't solve this problem.)
>It would be nice to have a cmap format which maps multiple characters to
>single glyphs initially.
>
>The way we deal with this is to have the ligatures with the ZWJ inserted
>as part of a ligature table which is on by default and which isn't
>revealed to the UI so that the user can't turn them off.

That would be possible in OpenType using the Required Ligatures <rlig>
feature, which is the same feature used in Arabic for the lam-alif
ligature. It is certainly feasible, and I cannot think of a good reason not
to use this approach.

John Hudson

Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com

Language must belong to the Other -- to my linguistic community
as a whole -- before it can belong to me, so that the self comes to its
unique articulation in a medium which is always at some level
indifferent to it. - Terry Eagleton



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