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

From: James Kass (jameskass@worldnet.att.net)
Date: Wed Aug 14 2002 - 15:07:32 EDT


Michael Everson wrote in response to William Overington,

>
> I suggest you stop calling it the "golden ligatures collection". This
> term imputes a status and nobility to it which it simply doesn't
> have. Indeed, I suggest that you abandon this task and use
> appropriate font technology to achieve your aims.
> --

Appropriate font technology for Latin ligature display exists,
but it isn't enabled yet in Microsoft's Uniscribe.*

Mac users may not understand what all the hooplah is about
with regards to Latin typography. AFAICT, Latin ligation
and combining diacritics already work on Macs, and have
probably been working for some time.

For PC users, the only way to display a "ct" ligature as text
in mainstream applications is to use PUA or some other
proprietary font encoding.

The Golden Ligatures Collection simply offers font developers
and end users an opportunity to make use of some rather
interesting ligatures in a consistent, although non-standard,
fashion. Some font developers might even elect to map
Latin ligature glyphs to GLC code positions in addition to
offerring GSUB OpenType substitution tables. This practice,
sometimes referred to as holomapping, might be regarded
as a "work-around", or temporary solution.

More information about the Golden Ligatures Collection may
be found at:
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/
...which is the Overington family web site in Cyberspace.

For an explanation of the origin of the name "Golden Ligatures
Collection", please refer to William Overington's letter to this
list from 2002-06-03 (thread: "The golden ligatures collection").

Respe<U+E707>fully,

James Kass.

* Microsoft is working on adding Latin OpenType support to
Uniscribe.



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