02-25-2010, 02:19 AM | #1 | |
Wizard
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What's with ligatures?
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.
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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):
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. " Anyway, I think I could probably write a sed script that would handle the above, and I'm no programmer. Last edited by frabjous; 03-02-2010 at 12:30 AM. Reason: [Since I'm now apparently the thread owner, even though I didn't actually begin this thread or assign it a title, I still wanted the thread to end in a question mark rather than a period...] |
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02-25-2010, 08:13 AM | #2 | |||
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02-25-2010, 04:50 PM | #3 |
Wizard
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Well, you'll definitely want to embed fonts if you plan to try to use ligatures.
To test, I created a one-line text (utf8) file: Code:
My affinity for fish offends floridians. Calibre's viewer at least showed all the right characters, and the fi and fl ligatures look good, but the ff and ffi ligatures were rendered in a different font. Not exactly a step towards more professional output! But that's better than what ADE did with it: Here the ff and ffi ligatures were completely missing. (I'd imagine that ffl wouldn't work either. I should have made the floridians affluent, I guess.) And yeah, searchability broken. I was kind of hopeful that ADE would be smart about this, since Adobe Acrobat and Reader can "see through" ligatures when doing search (as can most PDF software, from what I've seen), ADE certainly can't. Hopefully that'll change. |
02-25-2010, 06:27 PM | #4 |
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Thanks for those examples. You'd sure think Adobe would have included things like ligatures and other font alternates in ADE right out of the gate. Somewhat esoteric things like optical margins and shaped text wrapping around drop caps I could understand as being left out of the first few revisions of ADE, but ligatures are pretty basic typography. And we are talking about software that's supposed to display book text, after all. Sigh. Sometimes it's difficult for me to understand how that company thinks...
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02-26-2010, 09:27 AM | #5 | |
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Dream world: if reader converts text to ligatures
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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.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: Last edited by DGReader; 02-26-2010 at 09:33 AM. Reason: Added screenshot of HTML page rendering appears in TextEdit with ligatures |
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02-26-2010, 09:48 AM | #6 |
The Grand Mouse 高貴的老鼠
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This is the best solution - the text in the ebook should not normally contain explicit ligature characters. Instead, the rendering software should use ligatures when available in the font being used.
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02-26-2010, 10:26 AM | #7 |
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For what is worth, the Unicode FAQ says (emphasis mine):
The existing ligatures exist basically for compatibility and round-tripping with non-Unicode character sets. Their use is discouraged. What could be used is the zero-with no-joiner to avoid ligatures at specific places. |
02-26-2010, 10:41 AM | #8 |
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Actually, in the end, the user should be able to decide. A well-designed ebook with a good typesetting engine for its reflowable format should present the user with many options. Simple things would be setting margins, default fonts, and setting up the various zoom font levels. Then there should be an advanced tab for people who care about such things to define things like using optical margins, hyphenation, kerning, use of ligatures, maximum and minimum word spacing, maximum and minimum letter spacing, and many other typographical options. In fact, an advanced settings section ought to even include the ability to turn on or off these various options for different zoom levels, since what looks good at a smaller point size might not look so good on large.
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02-26-2010, 10:58 AM | #9 | |||
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I couldn't get it to work in Chromium or Opera, though. Safari doesn't exist for linux. Is your version of Hoefler Text OpenType or AAT? I wonder if that makes a difference. In any case, the fact that this already happens for any major browser (especially an Open Source one) leaves reading device manufacturers with no excuses for not implementing it on their end! Quote:
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Last edited by frabjous; 02-26-2010 at 11:12 AM. |
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02-26-2010, 12:01 PM | #10 |
frumious Bandersnatch
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And I bet they don't have a fj ligature either (as in fjord)... Wait, the fj ligature is not defined in Unicode, though fi is
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02-26-2010, 12:59 PM | #11 | |
The Grand Mouse 高貴的老鼠
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Here's an example from Garamond Premier Pro, set using the bundled TextEdit on Mac OS X 10.5. The ligature is used automatically. |
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02-26-2010, 01:50 PM | #12 | ||
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02-26-2010, 03:11 PM | #13 | |
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Too bad ePub software won't really allow us to make the best use of these. |
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02-26-2010, 04:36 PM | #14 | |
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So, for me, ligatures are a non-starter. Period. They may work well for you, but not for me. And outside of textbooks and technical manuals where the lack of competing literature force me to put up with them, I tend to avoid printed works that rely on them. Thus, I really don't care whether the applications on my ereaders do an adequate job of displaying them as I tend to filter them out when format-shifting. Derek |
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02-26-2010, 04:38 PM | #15 |
The Grand Mouse 高貴的老鼠
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Yes. The rendering engines could do with a lot of improvements, especially as displays get to be higher resolution. The Mirasol display is going to be about 225 dpi or so. We can't be many years off a high quality 300dpi paper-like display.
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