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

On 26/07/08 23:19:08, Ph. D. wrote:

> Ligatures are not really needed in computer typesetting,
> of course, but in many typefaces copied from metal
> originals, they are kept for aesthetic (or just historical)
> reasons.
I prefer to think that aesthetic reasons could constitute a need,
especially in something like typesetting.

>There is good reason to keep them in fonts
> (such as Palatino) where they are not needed,
> because if you set something in, say Caslon, using
> ligatures, you can then switch the text to another
> font, say Palatino, without the software needing to
> know about substituting f and i for fi.
The software has to know that anyway, though. What happens when you
want to run a spellcheck or find the word "fire"? In addition, what
about when you want to use a font that has a ch ligature? Obviously
it's silly to say that all fonts should contain any potential ligature,
because any sequence of letters is potentially a ligature. And on the
other hand what happens if you decide you want to add a bit more letter
spacing at this particular point?

Modern fonts --- OpenType and Apple's AAT --- contain systems to deal
with ligatures automatically, and more and more software copes with
this.

In any case, my comment about Palatino referred to the fact that, in
the version I have at least, there is an fi ligature even though
there's no need. The i (including the serif) is perfectly normal, but
the crossbar of the f extends into the i's serif. Because they're
different sizes, the join isn't smooth. It's a gratuitous ligature.

I have got some fonts with fi "ligatures" which are no different at all
from an f followed by an i --- but if you can't tell it's an fi
ligature by looking at it, then it's not an fi ligature at all for my
purposes here, just a way to fill in a codepoint that shouldn't even be
in Unicode at all (well, except for backwards/roundtrip compatibility,
but not independently warranted like say "æ" is).

--
Tristan.