| Odysseus 2007-09-26, 4:27 am |
| In article <9i6os4-o17.ln1@news.ducksburg.com>,
Adam Funk <a24061@ducksburg.com> wrote:
> On 2007-09-18, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
>
<snip>
>
>
> I wasn't talking specifically about Fraktur fonts but about German
> language conventions. AIUI (but this might be old-fashioned)
> ligatures should not span the constituents of compound words, so "fl"
> is printed as a ligature in "fliegen" but as two separate characters
> in "Auflag".
Sort of the converse problem to machine hyphenation, without dictionary
lookup to catch exceptions to common patterns (e.g. parts of word stems
that mimic affixes). Current commercial typesetting & page-layout
applications, like Adobe InDesign or QuarkXPress*, can do automatic
ligature substitution (and use other variant letterforms) when using
appropriately configured OpenType fonts, but AFAIK this is still a
'mechanical' function with no sensitivity to context.
Even though hyphenation software can now avoid most common blunders, I
still prefer to turn it off and judiciously insert discretionary hyphens
by hand as required to keep the colour of the text consistent. I imagine
it will be some time before 'intelligent' automatic ligature
substitution becomes readily available.
*) QX on Macintosh has always (? since ca. 1992 at the latest) been able
to do automatic fi- and fl-ligature substitution, while correctly
parsing the results--including those entered from the keyboard by typing
option-% or option-^ --when spell-chequing or hyp-henating. It also had
an option to make exceptions of "ffi" and "ffl". The settings were
document-wide, so one couldn't use the ligatures in one font and not
another: where a design called for a font that lacked the glyphs, or was
inappropriately encoded, the feature had to be turned off completely.
--
Odysseus
|