Hi,
It is unfortunate that Open Office still does not support ligatures of
simple scripts (English etc.) in ISO-8859-1 code space.
WorldPad by SIL.org has been supporting ligatures since its inception:
http://scripts.sil.org/WorldPadDownload
The latest version of Firefox browser and its Thunderbird email client
also support ligatures. Mozilla does so through its support of the SVG
specification adopted by W3C
http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/
The CSS-like directive "text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;" is used to
enable ligature formation in web pages.
Indic users would start using the Single-byte transliterated forms of
their languages the moment ligatures are supported in Open Office. The
first of these languages that use SBCS transliteration is SInhala.
Please do the following test to see Firefox displaying transliterated
text of a complex script via a smart font.
Install the following font:
http://www.americansmartfonts.com/download/Suriyakumara.ttf
and view the following page inside Firefox 3.
http://www.lovatasinhala.com/
There are thousands of ligatures in this page. You can identify the
ligatures by finding multiple cursor positions within the complex
letters. Also you could copy the text and paste it inside Notepad and
see the underlying Latin text. The ligatures are stored in the Private
Use Area of the font and retrieved via lookup tables in the font.
Does Open Office have plans for Latin script ligatures? It is otherwise
possible for the Mozilla developers to make a word processor by
isolating and enhancing the editor in Thunderbird
JC.
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