Quote:
Originally Posted by Jellby
Ligatures are a typesetting fancy which should be done by the rendering program, and not coded in the source, like kerning and paragraph breaking. Besides, ligatures whould mess text-search.
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Yes, I understand. I guess the right question to ask is whether eBook readers (such as the Sony or Kindle) would convert text to ligatures on their own. I suppose the answer is no. I can't even get Safari, Firefox, or Opera to convert adjacent letters to ligatures. Camino, on the other hand, does this beautifully. Here is a screen shot from Camino, and I'll show the source code below.
Source code:
Code:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en-us">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>Ligature Test Page</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1 style="font: 72pt 'Hoefler Text'">Afflictions of affluent office file systems</h1>
</body>
</html>
P.S. I realize that another reason this doesn't work for the majority of the Web is that most people don't have Hoefler text. I could suggest Times as an alternative, but most people probably don't have that either. None of the fonts Microsoft puts out, except for the newer OpenType fonts, have any ligatures in them, and none of Microsoft's
Core fonts for the Web have ligatures. I don't suppose most eBook readers are preloaded with fonts that have ligatures, either. And even if I embedded a font that has ligatures, I don't know if there would be any way to force all ligatures to be used. Oh well!
P.P.S. I use the words "afflictions" and "systems" to test both the "ffl" ligature and the rarer "ct" and "st" ligatures. I can get these to show up in TextEdit by selecting the text and then selecting Format, Font, Ligatures, Show All. Here's what the HTML page above looks like in TextEdit when I select "Show All" ligatures:
