From: Asmus Freytag (asmusf@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Sat Mar 05 2005 - 22:38:57 CST
At 07:56 PM 3/5/2005, Doug Ewell wrote:
>Reading Michael Everson's papers in 1998 about ZWJ and automatic
>ligation, I got the sense that such capabilities would be within my
>reach soon. For years, Word has been able to convert straight quotes
>into curly quotes, and convert text like *this* and _this_ into real
>italics and boldface. Why can't it display "field" and "flip" and
>"stuff" with f-ligatures?
Because ligatures (in many languages) cannot be uniformly applied
to paired characters. The pair has to belong to the same part of
a compound word. We've had delightful discussions of this, search
the archives for 'Wachstube'.
Since it involves user input (at least in these languages) it's not a
lightweight process.
>I'm not asking for ligatures for combinations like "fb" and "fh" (though
>I know they would be welcome in Irish), nor for arcane and quaint "ct"
>or "st" ligatures -- just "fi" and "fl" ligatures, and maybe "ff" and
>some combinations thereof.
Scandinavians would cringe at your casual omission of 'fj' (thing fjord).
A./
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