From: Behnam (behnam.rassi@gmail.com)
Date: Sat Nov 24 2007 - 12:09:15 CST
I'm more with the view of John Hudson on this. Arabic script (among
others) is not written on a line, but in a space. It's only the
publishing industry limitations that forced it to be drawn on a line.
It is not an assembly of letters but an assembly of words. And in
contextualization, each letter should be substituted by a
presentation form in plain text anyway.
I'm certainly for some sort of convention in using for example ZWNJ
in forcing ligatures in or out. But the 'correct' presentation of a
text is in the eyes of beholder. The historic registration can be
done by pictures. I don't think PDF is intended for this.
Also the user option must be a hands-on feature, not hidden in the
conceptualization of a font technology. At the risk of loosing my
head here, I think Unicode should get more involved in the problem of
dispersed font technologies.
Behnam
On 24-Nov-07, at 11:10 AM, James Kass wrote:
>
> People generate PDFs from plain text and also from HTML. If I were
> using HTML for the purpose of reproducing a page from a two hundred
> year old book, I would want to preserve the ligature information. As
> something of a purist, I would want my reproduction to have ligatures
> where the original had ligatures, and not have ligatures where the
> original hadn't any. If left to the whims of some kind of automatic
> ligature formation, I would have to go through the text inserting
> ZWNJs
> anywhere I thought that an unwanted ligature might form.
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