Re: Ligatures

[ASSI]

Eli Zaretskii writes:
> On second thought, I think I misunderstood you.  If the font that is
> used shows "ffi" as a _single_ glyph ffi, and LibreOffice indeed
> highlights parts of this glyph, then I'd like to know how it does
> that, and how far does this capability extend.  I mean, what does it
> do with ligatures like ae, displayed as æ -- does it highlight the
> common vertical stroke for both parts?

The only program I ever used that I remember doing this (a WYSIWYG TeX
editor for DOS, natch) temporarily broke the ligature while you were
moving the cursor inside.  It looked a bit strange and was slightly
distracting if you were just moving the cursor without trying to edit
it, but otherwise did the job well.

I expect that fonts that make extensive use of ligatures have
information on where the ligatures can be broken and exactly how to
display the parts in that case, although I wouldn't be surprised if that
information is not very reliable even when just considering latin family
scripts.

> And what about "st", displayed as st -- this has a curved "hand"
> connecting s and t -- to which of the 2 does it belong for the
> purposes of highlighting?  There's also "hv" displayed as ƕ, let alone
> "fs" displayed as ẞ and "fz" displayed as ß.

The origin of this ligature has no general consensus AFAIK, but if you
read older (facsimile) printed literature from around 1800 it becomes
pretty obvious that the typeface evolved from a combination of long s
(mainly used inside a word) and round s (used at the end).  The origin
of "sz" in that place is even more complicated to figure out, but it
seems (to me anyway) that this was driven by a desire to preserve the
distinction to double s / "ss" when using typefaces that didn't have the
proper glyphs for the various types of "s" previously available in
Fraktur.  Neither "fs" nor "fz" should ligature into "ß" (which is a
proper glyph these days and no longer a ligature, although you are still
allowed to break it into either "ss" or "sz" when using typefaces that
don't support it, like most versalia).


Regards,
Achim.
-- 
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