At 11:00 -0600 2002-07-01, John H. Jenkins wrote: >I guess one thing that's frustrating for me personally in this >perennial discussion is the creation of this false dichotomy, that >ligation control either *must* be in plain text or *must* be >expressly forbidden in plain text. I would agree, Michael, that >your arguments that some degree of ligation control belongs in plain >text were unanswerable. You did a good job there. But at the same >time, I've never heard you argue that the only way to turn ligatures >on or off is in plain text.
That is absolutely true. I have never argued that the only way to turn ligatures on or off is in plain text. I saw that there were difficult edge cases and sought blessing for the ZWJ/ZWNJ mechanism to handle them, and won the day. But it would certainly be my view that those should only be used where predictable ligation does not occur. A Runic font which had an AAT/OpenType/Graphite ligatures-on mechanism would, in my view, be inappropriate, because ligation is unusual in Runic, never the norm, and should only be used on a case-by-case basis. Runic fonts should have the ZWJ pairs encoded in the glyph tables. >And under no circumstances should new Latin ligatures be added to Unicode. I agree. I wonder if it wouldn't be useful at some stage for me to pick the best bits out of my papers and do them up as a Unicode Technical Note. -- Michael Everson *** Everson Typography *** http://www.evertype.com
