Quote:
Originally Posted by hobnail
(I think of them as glyphs rather than characters.)
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Yeah. In normal language, glyph/symbol/character get used interchangeably... in Unicode, it gets a bit more technical, so "glyph" would be the proper term for a single displayed shape.
Quote:
Originally Posted by hobnail
But aren't those glyphs what's used in the output? My thinking was that when there's a sequence that can be displayed with a ligature then something happens to make the ligature appear in the output instead of the original sequence.
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On more technical Glyph/Ligature discussion, see the FAQ on the
Unicode.org page, "Ligatures, Digraphs, Presentation Forms vs. Plain Text", especially:
Quote:
Q: What about the “ct” ligature? Is there a character for that in Unicode?
A: No, the “ct” ligature is another example of a ligature of Latin letters commonly seen in older type styles. [...] One simply represents the character sequence <c, t> in Unicode and depends on font design and font attribute controls to determine whether the result is ligated in display (or in printing). [...]
Remember that the Unicode Standard is a character encoding standard, and is not intended to standardize ligatures or other presentation forms, or any other aspects of the details of font and glyph design. The ligatures which you can find in the Unicode Standard are compatibility encodings only—and are not meant to set a precedent requiring the encoding of all ligatures as characters.
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And in OpenType itself,
I Love Typography's, "An Introduction to OpenType Substitution Features" goes into some of the nitty gritty of how alternates/ligatures work.