Re: ZWJ and Latin Ligatures (was Re: (long) Re: Chromatic font research)

From: Asmus Freytag (asmusf@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Sat Jul 06 2002 - 21:01:04 EDT


At 08:06 PM 7/4/02 +0300, John Hudson wrote:
>>But ligature prohibition is a quite regular feature of German orthography
>>and any Unicode-based system that intends to provide generic support for
>>Latin script use, should be able to support it. As the prohibition is on
>>a case-by-case and word-by-word basis, it has to be marked in the text.
>
>The specific requirements of some languages with ligature restrictions,
>e.g. Turkish, are supported in the OpenType 'language system' model, which
>enables different layout behaviour to be associated with different
>orthographic systems. Unfortunately, the German rules really require
>dictionary support to be properly implemented, since the rules for
>word-internal ligature use/prohibition are intimately linked to spelling
>and cannot be algorithmically arrived at.

Once you support prohibited ligatures via ZWNJ, you can then extend the
ligaturing model to (somehwat more) historical documents, by using Fraktur
fonts that provide more ligatures. Similar prohibition rules that are
spelling based apply there.

This is still a far cry from trying to capture irregular printed editions
or manuscripts. I would be in favor of using markup for such (academic)
cases, since it is for a specialized need, not for standard redition of a
text in a given font and writing system.

A./



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