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

From: James Kass (jameskass@worldnet.att.net)
Date: Fri Aug 16 2002 - 05:04:04 EDT


Michael Everson wrote,

> >Appropriate font technology for Latin ligature display exists,
> >but it isn't enabled yet in Microsoft's Uniscribe.*
>
> That doesn't mean that this particular cataloguing of ligatures in
> the PUA is a good idea.
>
> >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.
>
> That doesn't make it a good idea.
>

From the Adobe Glyph List at
http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/type/glyphlist.txt

<quote>
# 1.0 [17 Jul 1997] Original version
#
0041;A;LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A
00C6;AE;LATIN CAPITAL LETTER AE
01FC;AEacute;LATIN CAPITAL LETTER AE WITH ACUTE
F7E6;AEsmall;LATIN SMALL CAPITAL LETTER AE
00C1;Aacute;LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH ACUTE
F7E1;Aacutesmall;LATIN SMALL CAPITAL LETTER A WITH ACUTE
...
</quote>

Small caps get assigned in the PUA in published lists, why not other
presentation forms, too?

Plenty of precedent exists. This may not be a good idea from an
encoding standpoint, but, right now this is a display issue.
OpenType technology should eventually enable variants to display
even when correct text encoding is used, but it doesn't work yet.

The Cardo font has presentation forms in the PUA area and so do
the Junicode and Code2000 fonts. Lots of fonts do. As a font
designer, you probably can understand a desire to be able to display
a glyph once it is drawn. If a designer puts a glyph in a font
without providing a user with any way to display the glyph;
the designer might as well not have troubled.

Best regards,

James Kass.



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Aug 16 2002 - 03:18:32 EDT