On Apr 27, 2013, at 12:16 AM, Hans Hagen
Someone had to show me the first ligature years ago and when he did that, I had to check every single book and document I had at hand to check if ligatures were really commonly used. I simply couldn't believe my eyes and the fact that it took me some 15 years of literacy and a couple of years of using TeX without ever noticing any ligature anywhere.
ha, and then you started recognizing tex docs by abundant use of frames around tables and, emdashes, funny logos with lowered and raised characters, and ...
btw, i have something similar with metapost: once you notice how precise mp is, you also notice how imprecise most other vector graphics are
I consider this (the fact that one doesn't notice it) part of a good design. It's similar with kerning: one doesn't notice it until/unless it's bad. It's similar in the kitchen also. One doesn't notice that
but i assume, as you were involved in lucida ot, that you know that this font has no kerns ..
(i remember seeing a monotype type one times that was advertized as being very good because it had 4000+ kerning pairs .. on one of those expensive sun-workstation typesetting systems that in the meantime disappeared)
(already for years i wonder that when printing from firefox etc it looks like the kerns are put on the wrong side of the glyphs)
Here's a nice one: http://xkcd.com/1015/ I feel that's what TeX does to you... Thomas