Re: ct, fj and blackletter ligatures

From: Thomas Lotze (thomas.lotze@uni-jena.de)
Date: Mon Nov 04 2002 - 07:11:35 EST

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    William Overington wrote:

    > I don't know for certain but I suspect that it is that font designers
    > do this so that people can use an application such as Microsoft Paint
    > to produce an illustration using the font. In the absence of regular
    > Unicode code points for the ligatures, a font designer has either to
    > use the Private Use Area and be Unicode compatible or make a
    > non-Unicode compatible font, if the font designer wishes people to be
    > able to have direct access to the ligature characters.

    Judging from what I' learned by now, this is not true: If a font
    designer wants to make a Unicode-compatible font, he has to use a font
    file format that supports Unicode, and those formats provide means to
    access unencoded glyphs by transforming certain strings of Unicode
    characters into them. And if I understand it correctly, Unicode
    compliance can only be achieved with all of compliant documents, fonts,
    and renderers. So there appears to be no need for direct accessibility
    of ligatures, alternates etc.

    So far the theory is very clear, and as far as plain text is concerned,
    seems to be directly applicable. However, if I have a typeset document,
    say in PDF format, then I might need something stronger than a means of
    suggesting ligation or variant glyphs if I can't be entirely sure of the
    behaviour of the rendering engine. The lines would get scrambled if a
    rendering engine chose to, say, not ligate two characters that were
    supposed to be ligated when the document was typeset, thereby using more
    space for the two of them than was reserved for the ligature. Does one
    have to rely on the behaviour of the rendering engine in that case, or
    does it make sense to call presentation forms directly in already
    typeset documents? What about searchability of those documents?

    > There are some articles about using WordPad and Paint to produce
    > graphic effects with large characters and gold textures and so on in
    > our family webspace, together with the gold texture file and some
    > other texture files too.

    And what's the relevance to Unicode of that?

    Cheers, Thomas

    -- 
    Thomas Lotze
    thomas.lotze at gmx.net                      http://www.thomas-lotze.de/
    


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