UE ligature (was: Vowels in Finlaesk)

On 4.9.2007 T. A. McLeay wrote:
> A letter in my anomalously named Germanic conlang Føtisk LATIN SMALL
> LETTER UE U+1D6B (in Phonetic Extensions, down the back), it has no
> capital counterpart.
Not even MUFI <http://gandalf.aksis.uib.no/mufi/> includes
it <grumble>.  Thanks to CSS ligatures are reasonably easy
to fake in HTML:

	<span style="letter-spacing: -0.25em;">U</span>E
	<span style="letter-spacing: -0.25em;">u</span>e

or if one wants, create a class

	.lig { letter-spacing: -0.25em; }

and then use

	<span class="lig">U</span>E
	<span class="lig">u</span>e

The -0.25em is a mean value which will produce reasonable
results with most fonts and sizes.  The (important) reason
for specifying the spacing in em rather than pt or px is of
course that you don't know what font size people will view
your page in, and so you should use a relative and not an
absolute measurement.

In Micro$oft Word one can select the first letter and then
navigate menu to Format > Font, select the Character Spacing
tab and adjust the spacing value appropriately.  I'm afraid
I don't know if/how it can be done in OpenOffice.  It is of
course tortuous but possible to do it in TeX.

In MediaWiki you can conveniently create a template for the
fake ligature (or any other hard-typed combination you use
frequently[^1]: I created <http://wiki.frath.net/Template:Ei
 > and <http://wiki.frath.net/Template:EI>, which allows me
to type the characters as {{ei}} and {{EI}} in the wikitext.
NB that MediaWiki's casing normalization makes things a bit
confusing; thats why the templates are actually called
"Template:Small ei ligature" and "Template:Capital EI
ligature" with redirects from "Ei" and "EI".  Luckily it
works intuitively to type {{ei}} and {{EI}}, as long as one
does not by mistake type {{Ei}} when one means {{EI}}...
(The reason for that particular ligature is that I wanted a
sign for /ei/ which looks like a modified _a_.  It goes back
to the recommended handwritten form of [a] to distinguish it
from [A] in the old IPA "Principles".

[^1] On FrathWiki you can also use an even better solution I
devised:
<http://wiki.frath.net/User:Melroch/Help:Special_character_insertion>
or <http://tinyurl.com/2krrp9>

/BP

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