On Thu, 18 Jul 2002 18:23:57 -0500 Peter_Constable@sil.org wrote:
Let's forget for a moment whether we're interested in ZWJ or ZWNJ. What do
you recommend to be the default behaviour with German text in the context
of software that has no particular knowledge of German typography and a
user that doesn't know to enter any control characters? (Let's suppose that
a font can have German-specific rules, but not the software.) Would you
rather have ligatures appear everywhere they would if English (say) had
been assumed, resulting in ligatures in inappropriate places, or would you
rather have ligatures nowhere, resulting in less elegant typography but
also no errors?
**> Having 'elegant' typography that is incorrect is not 'elegant' it is
wrong. The only choice that users have today is to disable ligatures, or to
manually use markup (where available) to disable ligatures where they are
incorrect. Actually I suspect that placing a SHY will result in the 'correct'
output for many existing implementations, as the forbidden places are internal
word boundaries.
**> What is needed is a consistent recommendation by the font community, based
on the recommendation by Unicode, to allow text to be coded in a portable way,
so that ligatures can be supported with overall on/off to select typography
and spelling can be handled by characters - possibly supplied by a nice piece
of lookup software in the spell checker.
A./
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