On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 04:46, Joshua Juran <jju...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Jan 10, 2009, at 8:41 AM, David Cantrell wrote: > >> It would be Really Handy for me to be able to press >> Something-o to get the oe ligature, something-a to get the ae ligature, >> something-t for thorn, something-d for eth and so on. > > Why are there even separate characters for ligatures? Isn't this a display > issue? Should a well-kerned 'AV' have its own ligature too?
Because those ligatures Dave mentioned are separate letters in some languages; the name is a bit misleading. Treating them as a presentation thing would be like treating English "w" as a ligature of "vv" or "uu" (hey, it's even called "double 'u'"!); sorting and searching would be an obvious place where this would start being a problem. Now, things such as the f-i and f-l ligatures are more like what you're probably thinking of (though IIRC f-i, f-l, and f-f-l are present in Unicode for strictly backwards compatibility reasons with certain legacy encodings); those should be handled by the display rather than by using separate Unicode code points. Cheers, -- Philip Newton <philip.new...@gmail.com>
