From: Doug Ewell (dewell@roadrunner.com)
Date: Mon Oct 15 2007 - 02:35:42 CDT
Philippe Verdy <verdy underscore p at wanadoo dot fr> wrote:
> I'm not sure however that you must call them "ligatures" (ligatures
> are normally typographic enhancements for legibility and they remain
> optional even if they are often recommanded, depending on the font
> styles actually used).
Ligation may be language-dependent as well as font-dependent. I see no
reason why a given ligature cannot be declared "mandatory" even if fonts
and display engines might render separate glyphs (which would be
considered less than complete support). I did exactly that with
Ewellic.
> If the ligatures are optional, it's best not to encode them at all,
> like you did; but if they carry a semantic distinction in your
> notation, then only they become mandatory and merit specific encoding
> (and so they are no longer ligatures but unbreakable letters or
> clusters).
I think what Martin has in his Sylabica can be broken into three
categories:
1. true typographic ligatures
2. combining marks
3. contextual forms
It might be interesting to go through the chart on page 7 and see which
are which.
-- Doug Ewell * Fullerton, California, USA * RFC 4645 * UTN #14 NEW URL --> http://home.roadrunner.com/~dewell <-- NEW URL http://www1.ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages ˆ
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