From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Sat Mar 05 2005 - 21:56:55 CST
Jon Hanna <jon at hackcraft dot net> wrote:
> (As an aside, does anyone agree that the text in the Unicode Standard
> would look nicer if they ligated fi?)
Yes, I do.
But I'll tell you something else: I wish to heaven that my
text-processing tool of choice, Microsoft Word, would let me create
ordinary, modern f-ligatures. I no longer even notice that they're
missing in the Unicode Standard and other professionally typeset works,
as I get more and more accustomed to not seeing them in otherwise
attractive text created by Word and Acrobat.
Direct use of the precomposed ligatures in the U+FB00 range is a not an
option, of course, since they destroy searching and sorting. But the
ligature *glyphs*, for "fi" and "fl" at least, are present in nearly
every font in my collection, certainly in all the WGL4-compliant fonts.
Reading Michael Everson's papers in 1998 about ZWJ and automatic
ligation, I got the sense that such capabilities would be within my
reach soon. For years, Word has been able to convert straight quotes
into curly quotes, and convert text like *this* and _this_ into real
italics and boldface. Why can't it display "field" and "flip" and
"stuff" with f-ligatures?
I'm not asking for ligatures for combinations like "fb" and "fh" (though
I know they would be welcome in Irish), nor for arcane and quaint "ct"
or "st" ligatures -- just "fi" and "fl" ligatures, and maybe "ff" and
some combinations thereof.
This is not a general flame against Microsoft or Word, just against this
one non-existent feature. (And no, it is not a Unicode problem.)
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
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