Re: How to write Armenian ligatures?

Elliotte Harold wrote,

> If you require that level of typographic fidelity, you wouldn't be using 
> HTML. Ligatures would be the least of your worries in that scenario.

I sometimes do, I actually did, and ligatures were a major problem.

Around the turn of the century I collaborated with a partner to electronically
reproduce a book published in 1684.  We did just about everything imaginable
with HTML.  We preserved unusual spellings and typographical errors.  We
inserted special spaces where needed, and we came fairly close to getting drop 
caps working.  Italics, bold, size, colour -- no problem.  We even found that the
Junicode font was compatible with the original printing.  It was our inability 
to display classic Latin ligatures without resorting to the P.U.A. which was one 
of the main factors preventing publication on the WWW.  (My inability
to spend more than twenty-four hours a day at the computer was another
major factor.)

The advantages of HTML were obvious:  italics, bold, font-size could be 
preserved in a way that was not possible with plain text.  HTML could
be created/edited in any plain text editor, since the mark-up part of
the HTML *is* plain text.  HTML was the dominant form of web page,
and information contained in HTML files could be posted on the web,
exchanged, archived, and searched.  At that time, the mark-up tags
were simple, mnemonic, and were inserted into the text right smack
dab around the actual text to which they applied.  My, how things
have changed.

Best regards,

James Kass

P.S. - If that old book had included any Armenian ligatures, we'd have
preserved them, too.