From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Fri Jan 17 2003 - 00:35:22 EST
At 01:59 AM 1/16/2003, Otto Stolz wrote:
>Kenneth Whistler wrote:
>>Handwritten forms and arbitrary manuscript abbreviations
>>should not be encoded as characters. The text should just
>>be represented as "m" + "m". Then, if you wish to *render*
>>such text in a font which mimics this style of handwriting
>>and uses such abbreviations, then you would need the font
>>to ligate "mm" sequences into a *glyph* showing an "m" with
>>an overbar.
>
>This will not work, as all 'mm' occurences are not written as
>m-overbar. E. g., G. Keller's "Die drei gerechten Kammacher"
><http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/keller/seldwyla/kammachr/kammachr.htm>
>could not be written with m-overbar, as the two "m" characters
>belong to different syllables; in modern orthography, you would
>write "Kammmacher", or -- if you wish so -- Ka<m-overbar>macher.
Ken's suggestion works fine, but only on discreetly selected runs of text.
In other words, it would be up to the user *not* to apply the glyph
substitution layout feature in the circumstances Otto describes. I drafted
an OpenType Layout feature description last year for a Scribal Contractions
feature to do exactly this sort of thing, but I recommended to MS and Adobe
that it not be included in version 1.4 of the OT spec because I think the
issues need to be better understood before publishing a general solution.
Obviously this is not a plain text solution: markup is required.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com
A book is a visitor whose visits may be rare,
or frequent, or so continual that it haunts you
like your shadow and becomes a part of you.
- al-Jahiz, The Book of Animals
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