Re: How to write Armenian ligatures?

I'm more with the view of John Hudson on this. Arabic script (among  
others) is not written on a line, but in a space. It's only the  
publishing industry limitations that forced it to be drawn on a line.  
It is not an assembly of letters but an assembly of words. And in  
contextualization, each letter should be substituted by a  
presentation form in plain text anyway.
I'm certainly for some sort of convention in using for example ZWNJ  
in forcing ligatures in or out. But the 'correct' presentation of a  
text is in the eyes of beholder. The historic registration can be  
done by pictures. I don't think PDF is intended for this.
Also the user option must be a hands-on feature, not hidden in the  
conceptualization of a font technology. At the risk of loosing my  
head here, I think Unicode should get more involved in the problem of  
dispersed font technologies.

Behnam

On 24-Nov-07, at 11:10 AM, James Kass wrote:

>
> People generate PDFs from plain text and also from HTML.  If I were
> using HTML for the purpose of reproducing a page from a two hundred
> year old book, I would want to preserve the ligature information.  As
> something of a purist, I would want my reproduction to have ligatures
> where the original had ligatures, and not have ligatures where the
> original hadn't any.  If left to the whims of some kind of automatic
> ligature formation, I would have to go through the text inserting  
> ZWNJs
> anywhere I thought that an unwanted ligature might form.