From: William_J_G Overington (wjgo_10009@btinternet.com)
Date: Tue May 26 2009 - 06:57:59 CDT
On Tuesday 26 May 2009, Andrew West <andrewcwest@gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/5/26 Marion Gunn <mgunn@egt.ie>:
> >
> > As a member of both the Irish translation team of IE
> (paid) and the Irish
> > translation team of Firefox (unpaid) - I have to step
> in to counter Andrew's
> > hatred of the latter
>
> You can't counter hatred. The fact that I dislike Firefox
> says
> absolutely nothing about the technical merits or otherwise
> of that
> particular browser.
>
> Andrew
>
>
I had never used Firefox until recently when I was informed that it can be used to test the glyph substitution of ligatures in a font.
http://forum.high-logic.com/viewtopic.php?p=11268#p11268
Two years ago I had tried to make some fonts with glyph substitution for ligatures using the Microsoft VOLT program, yet I had no way external to VOLT of testing the font.
Firefox 3.0.8 allows me to test the fonts.
I have thus far mostly only included ligatures as standard ligatures in my experimental fonts, and Firefox 3.0.8 displays those: if I try with a font that has some ligatures as standard ligatures and some as discretionary ligatures then only the standard ligatures are displayed - though whether that is how Firefox always acts or whether I need to give it different commands to request that it displays the discretionary ligatures I do not know at present.
Not a browser war, I regularly use Internet Explorer as that arrived ready-installed on the computer.
By the way, there is a di ligature in the example graphic!
I have my own hypothesis and wonder whether Gutenberg used ligatures such as di.
http://forum.high-logic.com/viewtopic.php?p=3933#p3933
That derives from some very interesting research that was in a television programme. That research seems to prove that Gutenberg used one-time-only matrices for casting type. I reasoned that, if so, then two-letter ligatures would each save making a matrix and three-letter ligatures would each save making two matrices. So maybe ligatures such as di were used for ease of casting a narrow i and saving money in matrix making, even though it does not look like a ligature.
http://forum.high-logic.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1080
William Overington
26 May 2009
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