At 22:03 7/1/2002, Tex Texin wrote:
>In following this thread, I am trying to find where, in a non-plain text
>product, I have the ability to make two characters into a ligature or
>cursively connected. (The latter I guess I could do with a wholesale
>font change.) For example, I looked at Microsoft Word and found that I
>can make the text shimmer and sparkle and have either marching red or
>black ants (When will Unicode have characters to do those?) but I don't
>see how to control ligatures.
>
>As someone who is not a high-end typographer, I don't recall ever having
>the ability to change ligaturing without replacing characters. I also do
>not ever recall having the need to, which I understand is part of the
>rationale for the Unicode policy. I am not trying to argue one way or
>the other. The discussion refers to other ways of influencing a font
>with respect to ligature and I don't recall ever seeing a way to do
>this. What kinds of products have these abilities?
Adobe InDesign and Photoshop have this ability using OpenType fonts (and
InDesign will do automatic substitution of f-ligs based on glyph names for
older fonts). Paul Nelson at MS is working on adding Latin typographic
layout support to Uniscribe, so that this kind of ligature control will be
available to any app that wants to make use of it.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com
Language must belong to the Other -- to my linguistic community
as a whole -- before it can belong to me, so that the self comes to its
unique articulation in a medium which is always at some level
indifferent to it. - Terry Eagleton
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