Feature Requests item #715, was opened at 2006-12-22 10:48 You can respond by visiting: http://sarovar.org/tracker/?func=detail&atid=496&aid=715&group_id=106

Category: Fonts Group: v1.50 Status: Open Resolution: None Priority: 3 Submitted By: Uli Laube (ulilaube) Assigned to: Hartmut Henkel (hhenkel) Summary: highlight ligatures

From time to time people in de.comp.text.tex ask for a solution to remove ligatures from german words automatically. As this requires quite some knowledge of

Initial Comment: Hello! the morphology of the german language, packages like rmligs or ligatex use lists of words to remove unwanted ligatures. As this depends on the ligatures available in the font used, it is quite troublesome to the compile the lists. I'am proposing the following addtion to be incorporated into pdftex: highlighting of the ligatures. If enabled pdftex uses a bold version of the font when it inserts ligatures in normal text and vice versa. Like /em and /emph work for italic text. This would allow the user of pdftex to prepare a draft copy of the document were all ligatures are highlighted and can be easily spotted. The user can then insert "| manually to remove the unwanted ligatures. Kind Regards and Happy Holidays Uli Laube ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Comment By: Uli Laube (ulilaube) Date: 2006-12-22 14:12 Message: Logged In: YES user_id=4116 Highlighting the ligatures would only be necessary in a draft copy. Then one would insert the "| in the appropriate places and disable the highlighting. A change in paragraph breaking is acceptable in my opinion as I would not want to distribute the version with highlighted ligatures. Changing the font color is a nice idea. But it would require an extra virtual font for every font used in the document as they might have different ligatures. Seems to me, that I have to learn how to write .vlp files :) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Comment By: Hartmut Henkel (hhenkel) Date: 2006-12-22 14:08 Message: Logged In: YES user_id=929 ...an example .vpl file with colorchange command: (CHARACTER O 2 (CHARWD R 0.777781) (CHARHT R 0.683332) (MAP (SPECIAL pdf:direct: 0.486 0.104 0.291 rg) (SETCHAR O 2) (SPECIAL pdf:direct: 0 0 0 rg) ) ) Regards, Hartmut ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Comment By: Hartmut Henkel (hhenkel) Date: 2006-12-22 13:55 Message: Logged In: YES user_id=929 For highlighting a boldface font is needed that has the same metrics as the non-highlighted one, to keep paragraph breaking unchanged. What you can do right now is to generate a virtual font that contains colored ligatures! It is in fact possible to add PDF color change command specials into the .vpl virtual property list files of the virtual font, These commands will then be inserted into the PDF page stream in front of the glyphs. But also some solution on engine level should be doable. Regards, Hartmut ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Comment By: Uli Laube (ulilaube) Date: 2006-12-22 11:22 Message: Logged In: YES user_id=4116 If a document uses different fonts, they might have different ligatures available. The special font and the macro packages might not be aware of this. As far as I know, the insertion of ligatures happens late when the .dvi oder .pdf is created. My hope is that switching to the bold version of the font when a ligature is inserted might be a way to have this feature work for all fonts. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Comment By: Frank Küster (frank) Date: 2006-12-22 11:08 Message: Logged In: YES user_id=3360 Since ligatures are inserted according to information in the fonts, I think this should be implemented as a combination of a special font (which uses noticeably different glyphs for ligatures), and a macro package that switches fonts. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can respond by visiting: http://sarovar.org/tracker/?func=detail&atid=496&aid=715&group_id=106