William, On the TYPO-L list,, Andy Crewdson wrote:
>'One Typeface, Many Fonts' >(http://members.aol.com/willadams/portfolio/typography/onetype.pdf) says: > >'Non-kerning [italic f]s do exist, with Linotype being noted (or notorious) >for making them, their rationale being that it facilitates letterspacing >lowercase text.' > >The way I understood it, Linotypes didn't really support kerns at all >(that's why they did the logotypes, right). See page xv of McGrew for >discussion of this, for example. Here's an analogy for those ligatures you were talking about. In lead type, it was easy to kern, and easy enough to create a logotype or precomposed ligature for whatever you needed. Unicode encodes data, the basic elements. Unicode decomposes those ligatures, even where they were encoded years ago for "compatibility". Fonts are supposed to deal with all the ligatures and so on. Tools to deal with this are not readily available or where they are they are not very user-friendly. I myself have only started to try to get a handle on it (well, I have been busy *encoding* characters). I confess: on Mac OS 9 when typesetting with Quark I do manually change all the fi and fl ligatures to the precomposed ones in the Mac Roman character set. But that's the fault of Quark and the Mac Roman character set -- not Unicode. Typography and typesetting evolves with character encoding. -- Michael Everson *** Everson Typography *** http://www.evertype.com 15 Port Chaeimhghein Íochtarach; Baile Átha Cliath 2; Éire/Ireland Telephone +353 86 807 9169 *** Fax +353 1 478 2597 (by arrangement)
