At 01:59 AM 1/16/2003, Otto Stolz wrote:
Ken's suggestion works fine, but only on discreetly selected runs of text. In other words, it would be up to the user *not* to apply the glyph substitution layout feature in the circumstances Otto describes. I drafted an OpenType Layout feature description last year for a Scribal Contractions feature to do exactly this sort of thing, but I recommended to MS and Adobe that it not be included in version 1.4 of the OT spec because I think the issues need to be better understood before publishing a general solution. Obviously this is not a plain text solution: markup is required.Kenneth Whistler wrote:Handwritten forms and arbitrary manuscript abbreviations should not be encoded as characters. The text should just be represented as "m" + "m". Then, if you wish to *render* such text in a font which mimics this style of handwriting and uses such abbreviations, then you would need the font to ligate "mm" sequences into a *glyph* showing an "m" with an overbar.This will not work, as all 'mm' occurences are not written as m-overbar. E. g., G. Keller's "Die drei gerechten Kammacher" <http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/keller/seldwyla/kammachr/kammachr.htm> could not be written with m-overbar, as the two "m" characters belong to different syllables; in modern orthography, you would write "Kammmacher", or -- if you wish so -- Ka<m-overbar>macher.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC [EMAIL PROTECTED]
A book is a visitor whose visits may be rare,
or frequent, or so continual that it haunts you
like your shadow and becomes a part of you.
- al-Jahiz, The Book of Animals
