Re: OT: Georgian road signs (Re: OT: Dvorak)

On 27/07/08 17:36:43, J. 'Mach' Wust wrote:
> On Sun, 27 Jul 2008 12:37:17 +1000, Tristan McLeay wrote:
> >Modern fonts --- OpenType and Apple's AAT --- contain systems to
> deal
> >with ligatures automatically, and more and more software copes with
> >this.
>
> That's how it should be. However, I have never found any blackletter
> font that would make
> this. I guess that typeface is just not modern enough for anybody to
> create a modern
> computer font. But then, the distinction between long ſ and short s
> probably goes beyond
> the capabilities of OpenType or AAT – does it?
My understanding is that in German at least the distinction between
long and short s isn't algorithmic, because an s before morpheme
boundaries etc is short. So --- although a word-processor equipped with
a dictionary could be able to do it for you, a font can't.

If it's just a very simple word-final vs non word-final rule, then ...
it's no different from Arabic word-final letter rules, but apparently
some context-sensitive rules can only be applied in some scripts, such
that proper Latin cursive fonts are impossible. I don't know if this is
one. In AAT there's no such limitation.

But in German and similar typographical traditions this applies to all/
most ligatures; morpheme boundaries stop ligatures (or is it just
compound-word boundaries?). Perhaps you could put in the zero-width
non-joiner and have ligation/long s applying by default, but whatever
you do you've got to do it manually.

As for fonts --- there's a TeX METAFONT font that has a vast array of
ligatures (it's designed to be similar to Gutenberg's original font,
although it has a much more modest 34 ligatures and capital letters
from a later font). Using TeX, the ligatures apply automatically.
There's a conversion of it to PostScript, but I don't know if the
ligatures apply there outside of TeX, or if it's been converted to
OpenType so the ligatures can apply generally.

> I was also quite disappointed when I saw that there's no possibility
> to use blackletter on the
> internet except specifying a specific font and hoping other will use
> the same one.
Indeed not. I suppose here you're trying to put examples in a
particular language in blackletter? I had the same problem when I was
making the Føtisk webpages, and ended up just doing them in PDF.

--
Tristan.

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