AW: Dutch IJ & the austrian stamp's encoding

From: André Szabolcs Szelp (a.sz.szelp@gmx.net)
Date: Wed Jan 18 2006 - 04:06:40 CST

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    Thank you very much,

    that about the CGJ was really insightful! (though in
    my opinion the described behviour is not an intuitive
    one). The problem probably is, that everyone only has
    a small subset of applicable applications in mind (me,
    you, the TC's members,...), and therefore an universally
    "intuitive" behaviour cannot be reached.

    Anyway, thanks for the up-to-date info.

    You are of course true, that "ch" and "tz" are ligatures
    in Fraktur, the 'c' actually touches the 'h' and the bar
    of the 't' and the upper horizontal line of 'z' merge.
    I had been slightly sloppy. There, on the
    other hand, we again have some problems with the terminolgy.
    The Dutch IJ seems to behave as a ligature in this context,
       [althought writing systems and typographic traditions are
        imaginable, where ligatures, (especially non-obligatory,
        merely typographic ones) might be broken up by formatting
        (e.g. letter-spacing) into the individual glyphs.]
    but it is not a ligature in technical terms, as the I and J
    are not connected. (in this context, an Y WITH DIARESIS or Y
    could be much more viewed as a ligature of the two, but of
    course, it is usually not, though it was in Dutch historically
    equivalent.

    On the other hand, ZWJ seems to fulfill the formatting the job,
    but of course, as always when you use ZWJ, only if you have a
    "smart font", and it supports it with a substitution feature,
    if, (e.g. in MSVOLT syntax, though I prefer Graphite
    [http://graphite.sil.org/] to OpenType, but it had poor support
    up to recently, only SIL's WorldPad supported it, but now,
    that there are efforts to implement Graphite in OpenOffice next
    to Uniscribe, this great smart font rendering technology will
    be broadly available).

    <latn> <NLD > I ZWJ J -> IJ.dutch

    (I would explicitly put this feature into the Dutch language
    setting, as the user would probably expect an IJ-ligature in
    latin script as a visually connected one).

    <latn> <dflt> I ZWJ J -> IJ.liga

    I request for comments ;-)

            Szabolcs



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