At 02:24 3/6/2002, Herman Ranes wrote:
>There is a related problem in connection with Norwegian typography: Most
>fonts include the 'fi' and 'ffi' ligatures, but I have never heard of a
>commercial font which includes the 'fj' ligature.
>
>Using such a font, the word 'fire' (four) would be ligated correctly,
>while 'fjerde' (fourth) would not.
>
>And exactly what does the rendering of the 'international' loan-word
>/fjord/ look like in printed matter around the world? I regularly find it
>unligated in English and German reference works which have in other
>aspects virtually perfect typography.
With the increased support of OpenType layout, I think you will see more
fonts supplying an fj ligature. The Adobe Pro fonts contain this ligature,
as do any Latin script fonts I have produced for clients over the past
three years. Most type designers I know are aware of the need for this
glyph, but until now they have not had a standard and reliable way to make
it available.
This is not really the same issue as Peter has raised with regard to Limbu,
where the issue is less the availability of a particular glyph but the
handling of a character by shaping engines that might fail to identify it
is part of the surrounding text. The former is a typographic and font
issue, while the latter is a text processing issue and may be an encoding
issue.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC [EMAIL PROTECTED]
... es ist ein unwiederbringliches Bild der Vergangenheit,
das mit jeder Gegenwart zu verschwinden droht, die sich
nicht in ihm gemeint erkannte.
... every image of the past that is not recognized by the
present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear
irretrievably.
Walter Benjamin
