Re: ligature usage - WAS: How do we find out what assigned code points aren't normally used in text?

From: Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela_at_cs.tut.fi>
Date: Sat, 10 Sep 2011 21:58:23 +0300

10.9.2011 2:14, Kent Karlsson wrote:

> But of course, which pairs of
> letters (or indeed also punctuation) are likely to occur adjacently
> is language dependent.

Indeed, and I used to think (some years ago) that in Finnish, even the
“fi” ligature does not matter much and isn’t used (as “f” only occurs in
words of foreign origin). But later I realized that _when_ a case for a
ligature appears, as in a word like “filosofia” (Finnish for
“philosophy”), it may matter a lot—depending on the font of course.

So I would say that it primarily depends on font and other typographic
parameters rather than language.

There is a deeper language-dependency. According to Oxford Style Manual,
one should not use the fi ligature in Turkish, as that would obscure the
distinction between normal i and dotless i (ı). This makes perfect sense
to me.

-- 
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Received on Sat Sep 10 2011 - 14:02:02 CDT

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.2.0 : Sat Sep 10 2011 - 14:02:04 CDT