From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Mon Mar 10 2003 - 11:44:38 EST
Andrew C. West <andrewcwest at alumni dot princeton dot edu> wrote:
>> I suspect it would end when you start talking about combinations like
>> qj and fþ that are unlikely to appear in natural language text.
>
> You should know better than to make rash statements like this on the
> Unicode list !
>
> I don't know about qj, but fþ is a not uncommon combination in Old
> English, e.g. hæfþ (3rd person singular of the verb habban "to have").
Most of the fonts I see on a day-to-day basis have NO ligatures except
fi and fl. Between that and the complete lack of support for ligatures
in MS Word -- a program which really should know better -- I guess I
don't think of ligatures being available to the common man (as opposed
to professional typesetters) as much as I used to.
When commonly available fonts don't even cover ffi, ffl, ft, and so
forth, and commonly available Windows software can't used the ones that
are there today, I imagine it might take some time before you start
seeing precomposed ligature glyphs for qj and fþ.
That said, I concede that major European languages should not be the
sole determining factor for which ligatures are supported and which are
not. I also concede that, as someone who is not a typographer or
fontmaker, I probably shouldn't have jumped into this thread in the
first place. Take it away, font guys.
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
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