Kenneth Whistler wrote as follows. >In practice, fonts might simply choose to have ligatures for >the entire sequence, to avoid complications of calculating >the accent positions dynamically. > >For more examples, just look in dictionary pronunciation guides. > >--Ken
An interesting problem which may arise is that the Unicode Consortium will not be specifying particular ligatures to include in fonts and that font designers may not have available from any public source a list of such ligatures for which to prepare the glyphs to include in a font. This could then result in a muddle in the future when end users are trying to use such ligatures in a document and find that for some key ligatures which they wish to use that the implementation in some fonts is by default action rather than special glyph, which default action may, for some requested ligatures, result in a typographically awful display. This issue first came to my attention in the matter of the ligatures for the romanization of Cyrillic names and unknown words, where special ligatures would be desirable due to the need to have U+FE20 and U+FE21 act in both TS and iu ligatures. I wonder if, for the guidance of font designers, there should be a list of desirable ligatures for which font designers might choose to prepare specific glyphs for inclusion in an advanced format font, the list prepared by consultation between the various dictionary publishers, libraries and so on. Such a list, while not obligatory for anyone to use, would nevertheless be a useful collected guide which font designers could use so that fonts could be designed so as have individual glyphs for all of the ligatures on the list. The list could include the specific Unicode sequence to access each ligature. It may be that there would need to be more than one list, so as to provide for various specialised areas of activity without making a general list too large. Do you think that such a published list or lists would be useful? William Overington 31 August 2002
