[Scribus] scribus and ligatures

John Christian Stoddart jstypo
Wed Jan 28 12:40:00 CET 2004


Hello,

On Wed, 2004-01-28 at 06:01, VAN?K Petr wrote:
> gewd mourning (I like Grim&Evil cartoon:D)
> 
> I'm thinking about Scribus right now to forget ugly plsql issues 
> for a while...
> How Scribus handles ligatures (e.g. 'fi' etc.)? It's just dumb
> questin - maybe it depends font definition. Can anybody try it?

It would be nice to have ligatures substituted automatically (some kind
of preference mechanism somewhere, to choose which ligatures would be
substituted would be indispensable), when you key in the editor or read
a file into a text box.

I don't have much experience with typesetting in German, but it seems
there are words (Auflage is one that comes to mind) that will hyphenate
exactly in the middle of the ligature, so exceptions such as these might
have to be taken into account.

Nowadays with certain expert and unicode opentype fonts, a significantly
expanded set of (old style) ligatures as well as alternate characters
have been re-introduced into typesetting (the jury is still out on
whether this is a good(TM) thing), so whatever solution is evaluated, it
should take this situation into account.

Since some of these newly designed fonts also have both modern (ranging,
all same width) and old style numerals (non ranging, different widths),
looking at methods to select either one or the other or even both(!) is
important too.

Thanks for listening,



John Christian Stoddart




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