At 18:20 6/29/2002, Doug Ewell wrote: >Font designers regularly include a glyph for U+FB01 LATIN SMALL LIGATURE >FI. It has always been known, and obvious, that a user could access >this glyph directly by encoding U+FB01. With the advent of OpenType and >a smart-enough rendering system, the user could alternatively encode the >sequence U+0066 U+200D U+0069 (f ZWJ i) and get the same glyph. (Or, as >John Jenkins points out, if you have a Mac you can see this glyph simply >by encoding "fi," without the need for the ZWJ hint.)
This is not Mac-only behaviour. So far I have yet to see a single OpenType font that uses the ZWJ to produce ligatures: they all proceed on the basis of applying a layout feature to regular text and affecting any sequence (e.g. f i) found in the feature coverage table in the font. Ironically, inserting a ZWJ in such a sequence is more likely to break a ligature than it is to form one. John Hudson Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC [EMAIL PROTECTED] Language must belong to the Other -- to my linguistic community as a whole -- before it can belong to me, so that the self comes to its unique articulation in a medium which is always at some level indifferent to it. - Terry Eagleton
