patrick andries wrote:
>>There are also various code points assigned
>>to ligatures and presentation forms, for example U+FB01, which
>>could be used in the FO source (at the risk of confusing
>>hyphenation, spell checkers and others).
> Not a good idea, these code points are deprecated. Ligatures are glyphs not
> characters, Unicode is about characters (yes, I know there are "historical"
> and compatibility exceptions)
I should have added "drawing the wrath of the Unicode folks" to the
risks :)
> Also, some ligatures are purely discretionary (like the ligated fi you
> mentioned in U+FB01). This behaviour should be driven by some styling
> information, I would assume ("I want a nice ffl ligature here if present in
> the font, and here a ct ligature if present). I do not know of any
> available means to specify this. The same is true for glyph variants (I
> would like this particular ampersand variant).
Variants should probably represented by different fonts. I *hope* fonts
which have glyph variants for certain characters are rare enough...
As for ligatures, AFAIK they follow established rules, and therefore
you have basically four options:
- professional: follow the established rules as far as possible
- artistic: make your own rules and follow them
- plain: never do ligatures
- lousy: random behaviour
I think ligatures could explicitely prevented by inserting some zero width
characters (non-breaking spaces or joiners?).
> What are the CSS people doing about this ?
It seems there are more pressing problems to solve. I'm not familiar
with recent CSS3 developments though.
>>Also, the discussion whether presentation forms have to be
>>expressed by the characters itself or out of band, for example
>>as fonts, has never ended.
>
> Unicode is quite plain about this, I believe it even states somewhere that
> the Arabic presentations forms were a bad idea .
Yes, Unicode is explicit about this. But there is still a sizeable
fraction left which thinks otherwise...
J.Pietschmann
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