Re: Ligatures (qj)

From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Mon Mar 10 2003 - 13:34:28 EST

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    At 09:55 AM 3/10/2003, Joop Jagers wrote:

    >Creating separate glyphs for pairs of characters is IMO a bad solution: none
    >of these glyphs is present in Unicode, so they have to be implemented in the
    >PUA, where no compatibility can be guaranteed.

    Ligatures do not need to be encoded except as underlying characters: glyph
    substitution lookups should be used to map from, e.g. the letters f and j
    to an fj ligature. There are, currently, only a handful of applications
    supporting such substitution, but this is true of many of the more complex
    aspects of Unicode text rendering. Expect this number of applications to
    increase significantly over the next couple of years. In the meantime,
    using PUA codepoints to encode *any* semantic combination of characters is
    a Really Bad Idea that reduces the life expectancy of your document.

    John Hudson

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

    It is necessary that by all means and cunning,
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    or by force. - Michael Apostolis, 1467



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