Sorry about editing this post but I split this discussion off from another thread
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=74990 Please discuss ligatures in this thread.
Quote:
Originally Posted by cmdahler
So far as I know, the answer is no. That's not because of the design of the particular file, it's because the epub renderers are not up to such professional-level typography. It'll probably get that way someday, but for now if you want to take your reading to the level of quality that includes things like ligatures, font alternates in professional-level fonts, optical margins, etc., you'll have to stick with PDFs.
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So long as the font contains the ligatures, you should be able to use them in an ePub, but you'd have to do the find and replace yourself. Actually doesn't sound so hard, but it would depend on what format the source document is in. The trickiest thing if it's in HTML format, for example, would be avoiding replacing e.g., "fi" with the ligature when it's inside a tag.
InDesign might even have a command to do it. Not sure. Never used it.
But there would be costs: it would screw up, for example, using the dictionary functions of your reader.
I'd hope in the future things like this could be done by the displaying/rendering software, and would't have to be done by editing the source.
But the quotes issue... I haven't investigated it that thoroughly myself, but it doesn't sound as if it would be so hard as people say to autocorrect these. What are the rules?
It would seem to be almost as simple as (for both single and doubles):
- After a space, a paragraph/linebreak, a slash, a dash, or a left parenthesis/bracket/brace, a quotation mark is an opening quotation mark.
- Every where else, it's a closing quotation mark (or apostrophe, which is the same).
There are a couple exceptions, such as the word `Tis (which could be acommodated), and some other unusual contexts, where these rules are broken, but I think this would do so well that it would definitely be an improvement to implement this even at the risk of an occasional error, as opposed to leaving the quotes straight. (I hate straight quotes.)
But I might be missing something: what other important exceptions are there (for English texts)?
(In any case, I've actually done the above substitutions with regex in books, and usually I'll end up with at most one or two going the wrong way in an entire book.)
I guess there's the intended usage for feet/inches, but actually I think those look fine when not straight -- using it for "prime" in math might be a bigger issue, though I think that would be a rarity and a well-designed math book would already be using a different character there.
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Anyway, I think I could probably write a sed script that would handle the above, and I'm no programmer.