Maurício wrote:
Hello,
just wondering: how many ConTeXt-ers depend on ligatures such as: '' (double quote) and '' (two single quotes) -> right double quote `` -> left double quote ,, -> DOUBLE LOW-9 QUOTATION MARK (...)
You got replies from experienced users, so I thought you could use an answer from a begginer; there are many of us out there!
Really, all of those are problems to me, even -- and ---. If you have ligatures at all, you have to take some (a lot) of time to learn how they work, and which ones are available, and how to avoid them when you need.
I would really like if we could replace ligatures for a nice page, linked from the "first steps" documentation, explaining the most interesting Unicode characters and when to use them properly. I've just read about U+2010–2015 in wikipedia pages about hyphens and dashes, and I wish I were directed to those pages instead of everything I've read about ligatures so far.
I'm not a professional user of Context, so of course you'll take that into account as you consider what I say.
actually, what is called ligatures here, are no ligatures in the real sense; they are tricks that use the tex ligature mechanism to achieve something (the fi ligature came out of f + i written in sequence but nobody in the past ever wrore, by pen, three -'s separated by a small space in a row, it's was just a longer rule) by adding a hyphen+hyphen=endash and endash+hyphen=emdash rule in the (first) characters ligature table in the tfm file, one could save typing this solution is a very english-language oriented one, because in quite some languages --- happens less often than characters with accents or whateve; i wonder what would have happened if tex had initially been written for another language because if the tfm file could have dealt with > 256 characters "u -> uumlaut would have made sense as pseudo ligature too ... sometimes it's even hard to get rid of such pseudo ligs ... in documents coded in xml, --- really is --- and it' snear to impossible in traditional tex to selectively get rid of it ... so, apart from remapping the weird single quote and the en/emdashes (too many docs around) is no real reason for the other ones ... Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------