Re: [Groff] Re: Unicode, EBCDIC, Latin-2, JIS for groff

[Werner LEMBERG]

> >You mean enabling/disabling certain ligatures for a given language?
> >This is missing yet.  On the other hand, it is highly
> >font-specific.  Currently, the number of ligatures it restricted to
> >the Western ones.  Maybe it should be generalized (e.g. `st'
> >ligature for French etc).
>
>
> I think we should harmonize with the UNICODE standard.  Version 3.0
> defines the following latin-like ligatures:
> 
> ae U+00E6
> oe U+0153
> ij U+0133
> ff, fi, fl, ffi, ffl, ft, st in U+FB0x
> combining half marks U+FE2x

This doesn't help at all.  We need an unlimited amount of ligatures
which can be freely defined by the fonts.

As an example, consider Gutenberg's Fraktur-like font which has more
than 30 different ligatures.

Note that Unicode ligatures are only there for compatibility with
other character sets resp. encodings.  Ideally, there should be no
ligatures in Unicode since this is a glyph feature not related to
characters.

BTW, ae, oe, and ij are *not* ligatures but characters, even if they
look like ligatures.  There are some other examples in the Cyrillic
script also.


    Werner