[NTG-context] Selectively supressing ligatures

[Hans Hagen]

On 8/11/2015 8:25 AM, Jan U. Hasecke wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I want to follow up on my own message below.
>
> I got the hint offlist that it should not be too difficult to convert a
> LaTeX package into a ConTeXt module.

I don't know but it would probably be a bit alien approach in the 
context code base

> So I guess that there is no built-in functionality of semantical
> switching between ligatures and normal characters.

The official way to do this is:

\starttext
     shel\noligature{ff}ul
\stoptext

which also preserves hyphenation and kerning as well as other tricky 
features that a font provides.

The best place to incorporate such a feature is in the hyphenator but I 
have no time now to do that. So, instead I added a few lines to an 
existing (probably unknown) mechanism:

\replaceword[more][shelfful] [shel{ff}ul]
\replaceword[more][shifffahrt][shi{ff}fahrt]

\starttext
shel\noligature{ff}ul

\setreplacements[more]

shelfful
\stoptext

The downside of the 10 line extension is that it's not the most 
efficient implementation but probably still fast enough.

> I am not a typographer – maybe I am wrong – but I don't like ligatures
> in the wrong places. Inserting ligature stoppers by hand is a tedious work.

I don't like ligatures in most places (why only the few famous ones ... 
a bit imposed tradition limited to old constraints)

> The latex package selnoligs was beneficial to me when I made a book with
> more than 1000 pages, where I would never managed to stop ligatures by
> hand.
>
> So what is your opinion about such a feature?

You can probably make a list of special words and adding that to a 
module is no big deal. I have no time to look into what is around and do 
that myself.

I uploaded a beta.

Hans

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