Re: CGJ for Two Greek Ligatures?

From: James Kass (jameskass@worldnet.att.net)
Date: Sun Mar 06 2005 - 22:08:26 CST

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    From: "vlad" <emperor dot vlad at gmail dot com>

    vlad wrote,

    > In a situation where it is important to distinguish between
    > dotted and undotted forms, wouldn't it make sense to encode an
    > explicitly dotted form, rather than an ambiguous one?

    Unicode does, Iİıi. (sᴍᴀʟʟ ᴄᴀᴘs notwɪthstanding. Ditto soft dotted property.)

    On the system here:

    U+0069, U+0307 = i with two dots above, stacked
    U+FB01, U+0307 = fi_lig with default positioning of combining
         dot, in other words the combining dot overstrikes
         inside the top of the ligature somewhat centrally.
    U+0066, U+200D, U+0069, U+0307 same as previous
    (Clearly, the font developer didn't anticipate dotting
         an fi ligature, otherwise the dot would've centered
         above the ligature...)
    U+0066, U+200D, U+0131, U+0307 = does not make a ligature
    (but neither does U+0066, U+200D, U+0456)
    (and neither would U+0066, ZWNJ, U+xxxx)
    (And, on this system - U+0066, U+0069 never ligates anyway in any
    of the plain text editors I've ever used. As expected.)

    Different systems may handle this differently. Here it is in UTF-8:

    i̇
    fi̇
    f‍i̇
    f‍ı̇
    f‍і

    IMHO, discretionary Latin ligatures should be disabled by default, unless
    ZWJ is used, of course, in which case the ligature isn't discretionary.
    Users should be able to enable or disable them.

    (Hmmm, would a Turkish small cap font map the dotted small U+0130 at
    U+0069 or U+0131?)

    Best regards,

    James Kass

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