Re: [NTG-context] Fallback fails for Linux Libertine O to Junicode over private area, debugging?

On 1/7/2022 7:55 PM, J. P. Ascher wrote:

On Fri, Jan 07 2022, 18:10:39 +01 Hans Hagen wrote:

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On 1/7/2022 4:18 PM, J. P. Ascher via ntg-context wrote:

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Hi, all, I'm a long time lurker (on gmane), first time poster. First, thank

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Any ideas? when you use a complex font (in this case with lots of ligatures) doing a fallback can interfere with these features especially when they have been put in the private areas which are basically 'undefined'

you're accessing an st ligature directly but normally you will do that by enabling a font feature

Thank you Hans, for your response, and your years of hard work on many great manuals and code!

I'm doing that deliberately, but for my own peculiar reason: I'm working on transcribing 17c texts in terms of the typographical sorts available in the physical founts of their print shop. I.e. I usually disable all ligatures and only manually put in a ligature when the physical type was a ligatured one, as best I can tell. Not every shop had the same founts and not every compositor used every available ligature in the same shop.

in that case you can best access the shapes by name (which is possible in context), assuming that they have one (often they do or they have standard locations like a few ligatures have)

My bigger technical problem is that I need to combine paragraphs of normally typeset prose with other paragraphs where I don't want the typesetting engine to change a single glyph, or too much of the spacing.

in that case you can best use a rather bare font i.e. no features at all apart from kerning and use dynamic features grouped in lmtx there are other tricks too \noleftligaturing \norightligaturing \noligaturing and other conbtrols like \noleftkerning etc

I pulled it off for my dissertation with a bunch of hacks, like the above, which proved to me that it could actually work. From the readers I've had, it seems that as you read more of the prose, you start noticing that the description is different in subtle ways and eventually--I hope--learn to see the evidence of typesetting that I'm writing about reproduced in my work and thus now can in the historical item itself.

one aspect is how ligatures are made: some fonts have single shapes, others use replacements and kerning of (then) multiple shapes

But, I think that the actual solution is a real font for this. I'm just making hacks between appointments--I can afford the time away from the treadmill of applications to do it correctly right now.

Sometimes, I wonder if a monospace, like DejaVu's, with the extra glyphs would make the distinction between prose and description clearer, but I'll have to wait until I have an occasion to try that too.

I'd be curious if anyone else has seen someone trying something similar.

yrs, -jp

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