Gutenberg's ligatures (spins off from Re: Tildes on vowels)

From: William Overington (WOverington@ngo.globalnet.co.uk)
Date: Wed Aug 14 2002 - 09:39:32 EDT


Previously I wrote as follows.

>There is a very interesting document entitled The Gutenberg Press available
>as a file named gbpmanual.pdf from the Walden Font website.
>
>The website address is as follows.
>
>http://www.waldenfont.com
>
>The address for the file is as follows.
>
>http://www.waldenfont.com/public/gbpmanual.pdf
>
>On page 14 are some special characters, ligatures and abbreviations, as
used
>by Gutenberg.
>
>Searching through the table is great fun so I will only mention here the
>first entry in the table which shows a letter a with a horizontal line over
>the top which is stated as "am, an" in the pdf file.
>

[snipped]

>I have not referred to the line over the top as a macron as I am not sure
>whether it is a macron. I say not sure because I am learning and am not
>sure in that context, not in any way because I am expressing a learned
>opinion on the matter or anything like that.

I am looking at the possibility of encoding some of the Gutenberg
abbreviations into the golden ligatures collection.

However, when it comes to items such as a lowercase a with a horizontal line
over the top which is used as an abbreviation for am or an I am wondering
whether that character is, in fact, the same as U+0101 LATIN SMALL LETTER A
WITH MACRON or whether I need to code a Private Use Area code point for the
Gutenberg abbreviation.

Could someone advise on this please?

Suggestions for other ligatures and abbreviations to add into the golden
ligatures collection are also welcome.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/golden.htm

William Overington

14 August 2002



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