[Dev-luatex] letterspacing and (no) ligatures

[William Adams]

On Feb 10, 2011, at 7:56 AM, Taco Hoekwater wrote:

> On 02/10/11 13:53, Patrick Gundlach wrote:
>>> 
>>>> * in pdftex, \letterspacefont does not disable the ligatures, but this is what happens in luatex.
>>> 
>>> IMO that's a desireable behaviour, not a bug. See Bringhurst, Oliver Simon's _Introduction to Typography_ &c.
>>> 
>>> A control to turn it off or on (defaulting to disabling the ligatures) would be okay, but I've had to put a lot of effort into turning off ligatures when letterspacing and it's a pain.
>> 
>> In older german texts ligatures are not letter spaced. For example:
>> 
>> B i s m a r ck
>> 
>> (the ck ligature is not seperated)
> 
> Neither was ij in dutch, but ff was separated. Which just goes to show
> you that doing letterspacing automatically is hard....

ck and ij would be (like ae and oe) diphthongs --- linguistic constructs denoting specific sounds.

ff is a ligature --- the joining together of two or more characters for stylistic or technical reasons.

William

-- 
William Adams
senior graphic designer
Fry Communications
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.