A little info about ligatures and e.g. Calibri

[Németh László]

Hi,

2013/2/7 Stephan Bergmann <sbergman at redhat.com>

> And do we have decent support to let the user specify where not to use
> ligatures in the input?  Or do users need to insert explicit U+200C ZWNJ
> with their input method of choice?
>
> (At least for German, where ligatures need to be broken quite frequently,
> I generally don't understand the enthusiasm for ligature-enabled fonts
> anyway, as in the hands of incompetent typists they lead to more harm than
> good.  What could probably help is to have automated rules that tell the
> computer where to break ligatures, similar to hyphenation rules.)
>

You are right. I knew the special requirement of German typography, but I
didn't check ZWNJ usage with ligature-enabled Linux Libertine G Graphite
font before. (It seems, the ligature replacement is default for German in
the original OpenType version, too). I have filled an issue about the
problems and the possible fixes:
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=60427.

I have made an initial patch in this direction: now spell checking accepts
the words with ZWNJ and ZWJ characters, also with Unicode f-ligatures in
the case of 8-bit encoded spelling dictionaries. (It seems, users of poor
TTF fonts need this poor man's method:
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=59337, for UTF-8 encoded
spelling dictionaries, you can set ICONV and IGNORE Hunspell options, if
needed).

I have already added some language specific exceptions for Dutch f-ligature
replacement in Linux Libertine G, but Graphite is not enough to handle the
requirements of German. Maybe a good method to handle this problem is a new
Localized option of Autocorrect "add ZWNJ for German compounds", also an
optional grammar checker feature "check ZWNJ in German compound".  Also
hyphenation and search/replacement may need modification.

Regards,
László


> Stephan
>
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