Re: [OpenType] Proposal: Ligatures w/ ZWJ in OpenType

From: David Possin (dave_i18n@yahoo.com)
Date: Fri Jul 19 2002 - 13:46:43 EDT


As an American who got stuffed into a German school in a small village
when I was 8 years old I recall actually learning German spelling,
grammar, and hyphenation rules, which I still remember today.

After following this thread and all the talk about German ligatures
without seeing hard facts I decided to do some research on German
sites. I like this one best (if you can read German):

http://www.publisher.ch/heft/993/ligaturen.pdf

Basically it says at the end you don't need ligatures anymore and if
you really need it, leave it to the experts, they have a gut feeling,
as nobody understands the old rules anymore. The author is very firm
about Americans trying to understand German ligatures: Don't even try!

If anybody is interested, I can translate it and a couple of other
interesting pages I found.

Here is a complete (?) list of old German Ligatures as found in
different fonts. It also is the most complete set of ligature rules I
could find. Now if somebody could implement correct hyphenation then
this list could be applied:
http://www.uni-magdeburg.de/bauke/latex/tipsutricks/oldgerman/

This is a very interting table with images of German medieval ligatures
and abbreviations:
http://gymn-benedictinum.de/san_projekt/augustinus/ligatur_1.htm

Dave

--- Markus Scherer <markus.scherer@jtcsv.com> wrote:
> Hm, playing advocatus diabolus for a moment, or maybe ignoramus
> depending on your opinion...
>
> Asmus taught me something about German, so I wonder how many Germans
> are aware of the ligature rules and would (and do!) object to
> standard ligatures being used by default.
>
> For that matter, I am not sure how many Germans (>5 years out of
> school) know hyphenation rules and such other than by gut feel.
>
> Disclaimer: I am German but
> - was (am) not familiar with any ligature/typesetting rules
> - did not have any training in Latin (might explain my intro)
>
> markus
>
>

=====
Dave Possin
Globalization Consultant
www.Welocalize.com
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/locales/

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