On 4/26/2013 11:48 PM, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 9:57 PM, Keith J. Schultz wrote:
to be honest I never noticed them when I was using LaTeX. It might have been the fonts.
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)
there is salt in food unless there's too little or too much of it present.
the opposite is true for hz and protrusion ... it takes a while to believe that tex can do a bad job when these are applied extremely and when applied less extreme one doesn't notice so i find myself never using it there's some similarity is discussions about typography and high end audio (esp dacs and amps) ... one can go to real extremes but at some point wishful thinking enters the equation honestly ... we cannot guarantee that texies will recognize 100% of the texts typeset by tex, given that one uses a non-lm font and non-standard layout setup or: when you see a tex typeset in lm and with some standard latex style that has been around for decades, it can trigger an 'ah it looks good' felling simply because one *knows* it has been done by tex nowadays when i read some novel with excessive expansion, inter character spacing and whatever, i always doubt it has been done by a badly configured in-design or equally bad configured tex
Mojca
PS: if you really hate the ligatures, you can try to help improve this "interesting" package to handle ligatures (it probably has the most potential in engines other than XeTeX/LuaTeX because it's a bit more complicated to turn off the ligatures there): http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/serbian-lig The package defines commands for all the words from a dictionary which contain letters "fi", for example \def\profit{prof\kern 0.03em it\xspace} \def\Gadafi{Gadaf\kern 0.03em i\xspace} % \stopsarcasm
whow .. it probably dates from the time before we had scripting languages that could parse text, although in that time tex's hash table/string space was too small to accomodate dictionaries pdftex has \noligs -) ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | voip: 087 875 68 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------