In fact I also think that the fi ligature is still suitable for Turkish, the way it is encoded, as meaning the ligature of a f and a dotted i. I don't see why such ligature would not exhibit the presence of the dot.
It is just a matter of glyph design, and a ligature of f and dotted i is still possible (all depends on how you design the "f" part, notably its top part). As well the same font design could include a distinct ligature of f and dotless i, even if it's not encoded in Unicode. The encoded fi ligature is clearly a compatibility character, no longer needed for correct rendering of ligatures with today's font technologies. How the encoded fi ligature should look like in the rendered glyph does not matter as long as you recognize the f and the dotted i in it. If most fi ligatures present in many fonts do not exhibit the difference, it's only because these font designs were not considering the needs for Turkic typographies, when most Latin-written languages do not have a strong differenciation between dotted and dotless i (these languages just have a concept of "soft dots", where the dot itself does not really modify the i, but only helps reading some old-style typographies, for example to help separate strings made of successive letters m, n, u, i). For long, the dot was only a typographic feature, used contextually in a discretionary way where it could be useful for readers, long before becoming a standard, and not a distinctive diacritic. The fi ligature belongs to the same class of typographic features, but it is probably not helpful with modern font designs like Arial, Helvetica, Times, or even Courier (in this case, a monospaced version of the fi ligature is really bad, but it should not prevent a double-width presentation of the ligature in a monospaced font)... I also think that for most Latin languages, it will be suitable to drop the soft dot on i and j, if it does not effectively help the reader. -- Philippe. 2011/9/10 Kent Karlsson <kent.karlsso...@telia.com>: > > Den 2011-09-10 20:58, skrev "Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorp...@cs.tut.fi>: > >> There is a deeper language-dependency. According to Oxford Style Manual, >> one should not use the fi ligature in Turkish, as that would obscure the >> distinction between normal i and dotless i (ž). This makes perfect sense >> to me. > > It does not make perfect sense to me. Rather that: > > *If f followed by i is such that their font glyphs overlap (using > normal letter spacing), making a ligature appropriate, makes that > *font* unsuitable for Turkish, as such a ligature would obscure...*. > > If that is what you (and other who have said the same thing) meant, > then fine. But taken at face value, your statement does not make > (typographic) sense. > > /Kent K > > > > >