On 4/26/2013 11:48 PM, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 9:57 PM, Keith J. Schultz wrote:
to be honest I never noticed them when I was using LaTeX. It might have been
the fonts.
Someone had to show me the first ligature years ago and when he did
that, I had to check every single book and document I had at hand to
check if ligatures were really commonly used. I simply couldn't
believe my eyes and the fact that it took me some 15 years of literacy
and a couple of years of using TeX without ever noticing any ligature
anywhere.
ha, and then you started recognizing tex docs by abundant use of frames
around tables and, emdashes, funny logos with lowered and raised
characters, and ...
btw, i have something similar with metapost: once you notice how precise
mp is, you also notice how imprecise most other vector graphics are
I consider this (the fact that one doesn't notice it) part of a good
design. It's similar with kerning: one doesn't notice it until/unless
it's bad. It's similar in the kitchen also. One doesn't notice that
but i assume, as you were involved in lucida ot, that you know that this
font has no kerns ..
(i remember seeing a monotype type one times that was advertized as
being very good because it had 4000+ kerning pairs .. on one of those
expensive sun-workstation typesetting systems that in the meantime
disappeared)
(already for years i wonder that when printing from firefox etc it looks
like the kerns are put on the wrong side of the glyphs)
there is salt in food unless there's too little or too much of it
present.
the opposite is true for hz and protrusion ... it takes a while to
believe that tex can do a bad job when these are applied extremely and
when applied less extreme one doesn't notice so i find myself never
using it
there's some similarity is discussions about typography and high end
audio (esp dacs and amps) ... one can go to real extremes but at some
point wishful thinking enters the equation
honestly ... we cannot guarantee that texies will recognize 100% of the
texts typeset by tex, given that one uses a non-lm font and non-standard
layout setup
or: when you see a tex typeset in lm and with some standard latex style
that has been around for decades, it can trigger an 'ah it looks good'
felling simply because one *knows* it has been done by tex
nowadays when i read some novel with excessive expansion, inter
character spacing and whatever, i always doubt it has been done by a
badly configured in-design or equally bad configured tex
Mojca
PS: if you really hate the ligatures, you can try to help improve this
"interesting" package to handle ligatures (it probably has the most
potential in engines other than XeTeX/LuaTeX because it's a bit more
complicated to turn off the ligatures there):
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/serbian-lig
The package defines commands for all the words from a dictionary which
contain letters "fi", for example
\def\profit{prof\kern 0.03em it\xspace}
\def\Gadafi{Gadaf\kern 0.03em i\xspace}
% \stopsarcasm
whow .. it probably dates from the time before we had scripting
languages that could parse text, although in that time tex's hash
table/string space was too small to accomodate dictionaries
pdftex has \noligs -)
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