[Psymon]

Originally Posted by Jellby

Erm... No, if I understood it correctly. Your font does not use the private Unicode slots, but it uses some already reserved slots, for different characters, and makes them look like something different.

Just like the aforementioned Adobe Caslon Alt Regular font does -- it puts the "ct" lig in the "c" slot.

And it doesn't have a proper ligature definition, instead it forces you to use specific and foreign characters in your text. Or, if it does, then you are not using it correctly. If you write "ct" in your text, does the font display the ct ligature? If it does, then that part is correct, and you don't need to write the ¢ or whatever it is (but it still should be placed in the private Unicode region).

I just fired up my word processor and tried it, and it doesn't seem to (i.e. change "ct" to the lig, just by typing "ct"). However, that font has a lot more ligs than most fonts do: ct, st, sh, fi, ss, ffi and ff; and the italic has those plus is, sl, ll, as well as an alternate v.

As long as it's your personal work, do whatever you think is best for you. And about the last remark, that's precisely one of the things it would solve. If you leave all that ligature handling to the font, you could change fonts without having to change all the text. Suppose you now find a new font that has everything this one has, plus a nice "Th" ligature... you'd have to go back to your text and change all "Th" into "þ" or something like that. If you had it right from the beginning, and the fonts are "correct", all you have to do is change the font.

Well, I've looked and looked and looked, and although there are a couple of other fonts that look reasonably nice (that is, reasonably "authentic" for the period, and not overly-cleaned-up, digitally faked reproductions), I have yet to find any other font that is as nice and "complete" as this one -- and that's even with paid, non-embeddable versions, never mind freeware. In that regard, it's actually astonishing to me -- and certainly fortuitous for me -- that this JSL font set is free, and embeddable.

In any case, though, correct me if I'm wrong, but your only point in stressing that the font should use "legitimate" slots for where it puts the ligs is so that the text can be searchable and stuff, right? I mean, what other reason matters? It works just fine, and visually looks just fine -- the only issue might be readability and searchability. Well, in both those regards, that's virtually irrelevant: the text that it's displaying isn't modern English, but late-Middle English. Who would be doing a "search" within that (unless they're some prof or something who knows the language -- and all the insane variants of spelling, etc. -- from that time)?

The whole point of that second half of my book (with the first half being the same text in modern English) is more for the sake of "art" than anything else -- I suppose it's a study in language, too, of course, but even that is an artistic endeavour. Readability (that is, the easy understanding of the language), searchability and whatever else is secondary, really, than the visual impact of the work. And you might say that I'm making it inaccessible to visually impaired people, but, well, if I created an art book full of paintings, that's rather inaccessible in that way, too. I can't help that.

So while I do understand your point about this font set -- and how it would most definitely apply to, say, the first half of my book (in modern English) or any other "regular" book I might create -- I'm at a bit of a loss as to what exactly the issue might be in this particular case, with what I'm trying to accomplish here.

With that said, again I do genuinely appreciate your input, Jellby! This has certainly been a thought-provoking discussion, and these have all been very good things to think about -- alot of it I hadn't even considered, but even if I still think I should be okay in doing things the way I've been doing them (for lack of any other way to do them), at least I can now say that I'm doing them for well-thought-out, rational, mulled-over reasons.