Re: How to write Armenian ligatures?

On 11/24/2007 3:50 PM, Elliotte Harold wrote:
> 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 you require that level of typographic fidelity, you wouldn't be 
> using HTML. Ligatures would be the least of your worries in that 
> scenario.
>
If that book was a 200-year old German book, you may very well want to 
capture it in the Fraktur style it was published in. In that case, you 
can't get around ligatures (both mandatory and prohibited), even if your 
intent is not to capture the *actual* ligatures used by the particular 
typesetter -- it's simply that the style as such requires some ligatures 
and usually uses a large number of others. I believe that some of the 
latter could be (and were) used, or not used, to allow better line 
justification  (but I don't have ready evidence available for that one 
way or the other).

Books from that period would alternate between Fraktur (bulk of the 
text) and Antiqua/Roman style (lain or foreign words) in a way that in 
some way reflected the choices of the author (just like details of 
spelling or punctuation). Rendering such works in modern style 
essentially discards such information.

Therefore, even if you are only interested in getting at the *text* so 
to speak, you end up having to have support for ligatures (and control 
over them, because of the twin issues of required and prohibited 
ligatures). That level support is in principle possible with standard 
rendering layers, given that you have an OpenType font with the correct 
ligature tables. and that your text uses ZWNJ for the prohibited 
ligatures. So that's all very much plain text and HTML.

If you want to go further and actually create a faithful record of the 
*typography* of such texts, your requirements would go beyond what you 
can do with OpenType and ZWNJ, you would need actual markup.

A./