RE: Ligatures (qj)

From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Mon Mar 10 2003 - 13:15:47 EST

  • Next message: John Hudson: "Re: Ligatures (qj)"

    At 09:23 AM 3/10/2003, Kent Karlsson wrote:

    >You mean negative kerning (tweaking them apart)? That is almost certain
    >to create horrible glyph spacing for many fonts.

    In the hierarchy of typographical sins, collisions between letters and
    accent marks are usually worse than the spacing problems introduced to
    avoid such collisions. The exception may be in typefaces with a very wide f
    with a long overhang, in which case a variant f would come in handy. The
    most elegant solution is to a) decompose all diacritics and dynamically
    position marks, b) contextually substitute a narrower f before diacritic
    letters as appropriate, c) contextually shift the accent mark slightly as
    appropriate to finesse the positioning. Ligatures are really a very
    inefficient way of dealing with such situations.

    John Hudson

    Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
    Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com

    It is necessary that by all means and cunning,
    the cursed owners of books should be persuaded
    to make them available to us, either by argument
    or by force. - Michael Apostolis, 1467



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