From: D. Starner (shalesller@writeme.com)
Date: Mon Mar 01 2004 - 23:02:45 EST
> But can someone explain to me why a ligatures such as ct which CANNOT be
> accurately decomposed into individual characters (at least, it can't if
> it's designed PROPERLY) shouldn't be encoded in its own right?
> Non-decomposability is the special feature of all the ligatures currently
> included in Alphabetic Presentation Forms.
No, it's not. As has been said several times, the only reason for those
ligatures is because they happened to be in older standards that needed
one to one mappings.
> How about the German double s/eszett (U+017F) a ligature of long s and s
> which cannot be accurately built up from it's components.
The eszett, as used in modern texts, is not a ligature. It's a letter in
its own right. (I assume you mean U+00DF and not U+017F, the long S.)
> There must be countless historical facsimile editions printed every year
> which use the st and ct ligature extensively. The production of these
> items would hugely benefit from having a fixed codepoint for "ct" instead
> of it wandering all over the PUA depending on what font you're using.
First place, most facsimile editions aren't retypeset; they're graphical
copies of the original typeset edition. Furthermore, facsimile editions
are strongly tied to the original font. Most importantly, you don't need
to wander all over the PUA - with modern typesetting systems and good fonts,
you just place a ct there and the software automatically ligatures it for you.
You can use a ZWJ to ask for a ligature and ZWNJ to make sure there isn't one.
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