Re: How to write Armenian ligatures?

From: James Kass (thunder-bird@earthlink.net)
Date: Sun Nov 25 2007 - 08:38:29 CST

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    Elliotte Harold wrote,

    > If you require that level of typographic fidelity, you wouldn't be using
    > HTML. Ligatures would be the least of your worries in that scenario.

    I sometimes do, I actually did, and ligatures were a major problem.

    Around the turn of the century I collaborated with a partner to electronically
    reproduce a book published in 1684. We did just about everything imaginable
    with HTML. We preserved unusual spellings and typographical errors. We
    inserted special spaces where needed, and we came fairly close to getting drop
    caps working. Italics, bold, size, colour -- no problem. We even found that the
    Junicode font was compatible with the original printing. It was our inability
    to display classic Latin ligatures without resorting to the P.U.A. which was one
    of the main factors preventing publication on the WWW. (My inability
    to spend more than twenty-four hours a day at the computer was another
    major factor.)

    The advantages of HTML were obvious: italics, bold, font-size could be
    preserved in a way that was not possible with plain text. HTML could
    be created/edited in any plain text editor, since the mark-up part of
    the HTML *is* plain text. HTML was the dominant form of web page,
    and information contained in HTML files could be posted on the web,
    exchanged, archived, and searched. At that time, the mark-up tags
    were simple, mnemonic, and were inserted into the text right smack
    dab around the actual text to which they applied. My, how things
    have changed.

    Best regards,

    James Kass

    P.S. - If that old book had included any Armenian ligatures, we'd have
    preserved them, too.



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