Re: Ligatures in Turkish and Azeri, was: Accented ij ligatures

From: John Cowan (jcowan@reutershealth.com)
Date: Thu Jul 10 2003 - 15:34:16 EDT

  • Next message: Peter Kirk: "Re: Ligatures in Turkish and Azeri, was: Accented ij ligatures"

    Philippe Verdy scripsit:

    > Where does the fact of saying that a Grapheme Disjoiner can be used
    > in Turkish to avoid that the f collapses the dot above a next lowercase i?

    It is settled that ZWNJ is the correct character to break ligatures.
    ZWJ means "make a ligature if you can; if not, shape characters to
    joining forms if you can; if not that either, do nothing." ZWNJ means
    "break ligatures, if any, and shape characters to non-joining forms,
    if possible."

    > I'm still convinced that a ligature is still possible for a turkish <f,
    > dotted-i> sequence, using <f, i, dot-above>. The ligature would apply
    > to the middle bar of the <f> joined with the top serif of the <i>,
    > but the top-right loop of the f would simply be a small horital bar,
    > disjoined from the dot still present on the i.

    Yes, theoretically. Whether that is good Turkish typography is a different
    question, which AFAIK prefers simply an f-glyph followed by an i-glyph with
    no ligaturing.

    IIRC, Portuguese traditional typography also avoids the fi-ligature, even though
    the language has no dotless-i.

    > The same ligature could be used for the encoded sequence <f, dotless-i>,

    I doubt that any font has a ligature for this combination at all.

    > So the encoded sequence <i, dot-above> is now made "equivalent"
    > (for rendering purpose) to <dotless-i, dot-above> (despite they are
    > not canonically equivalent per UAX#15: NFC/D) and not "equivalent"
    > to an isolated <i> (not followed above diacritics)...

    There is no guarantee that the native i dot looks the same as the dot above
    in a given font (it may have different vertical kerning or even a different
    shape), nor is there any guarantee that the i with its dot removed looks
    the same as the dotless-i.

    -- 
    John Cowan  www.ccil.org/~cowan  www.reutershealth.com  jcowan@reutershealth.com
    "'My young friend, if you do not now, immediately and instantly, pull
    as hard as ever you can, it is my opinion that your acquaintance in the
    large-pattern leather ulster' (and by this he meant the Crocodile) 'will
    jerk you into yonder limpid stream before you can say Jack Robinson.'"
            --the Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake
    


    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Jul 10 2003 - 16:16:09 EDT