eykhout@kunivv1.sci.kun.nl (Victor Eijkhout) (02/21/90)
Z3000PA%AWITUW01.BITNET@UWAVM.ACS.WASHINGTON.EDU writes: >and maybe other characters for other European languages! In Dutch the 'ij' is really a ligature: the lip of the 'j' should reach under the 'i'. Very close kerning! Let's consider this a national character. Victor.
dhosek@jarthur.Claremont.EDU (dhosek) (02/21/90)
In article <1064@kunivv1.sci.kun.nl> scribitur: >In Dutch the 'ij' is really a ligature: the lip of the 'j' >should reach under the 'i'. Very close kerning! Let's consider >this a national character. In doing research for a type design project, I noticed the ij ligature appearing in all sorts of contexts, but never with anything more than "i-j ligature" to identify it. Now I at least know the language responsible for this. Also, in every typeface that I saw this combination occur, it appeared that the i and j of the ligature were identical to the ordinary i and j. The ligature status appears to be an artifact of a time when the close kerning described wasn't possible (think about TeX's boxes and imagine they can't overlap and there's your typesetting problem with ij). Now, does ij-lig occur every time i+j appears or only sometimes? (in Latin, for example, \oe is only used if oe represents a dipthong. Thus p\oe{}na, but poeta.) If it occurs every time, then an implicit kern would be more efficient than a ligature (they both need a different TFM from CM, but the former needs no additional glyphs). If it occurs only sometimes, \def\ij{i\kern-<something>j} would work but would prohibit hyphenation (the accent/hyphenation problem isn't because of accents, per se, but because TeX does not hyphenate words with explicit kerns), so in this case, having an ij national character would make sense. -dh -- "Odi et amo, quare id faciam, fortasse requiris? nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior" -Catullus D.A. Hosek. UUCP: uunet!jarthur!dhosek Internet: dhosek@hmcvax.claremont.edu
eykhout@kunivv1.sci.kun.nl (Victor Eijkhout) (02/23/90)
About the 'i-j' in Dutch. In a way this is a variant of the English 'y'. The Dutch term is the 'long y'. Let's consider it as a broken-up, dotted, y. TeX likes to hyphenate between the i and the j; this is always wrong (maybe some artificially created exceptions exist; you might try something containing the preposition 'anti'. Like 'antijichtpillen'. But that's on a par with the TeX problem of the erroneous ligature in 'shelfful', or 'halflive') Don Hosek is right that it's more a kerning problem than a ligature. Small problem: the kapital form is 'IJ', as in IJselmeer. But that's only a problem for people who write macros that capitalize a text (not uppercasing!). Victor.
koontz@cam.nist.gov (John E. Koontz X5180) (02/24/90)
In article <1070@kunivv1.sci.kun.nl>, eykhout@kunivv1.sci.kun.nl (Victor Eijkhout) writes: > > About the 'i-j' in Dutch. > > In a way this is a variant of the English 'y'. The Dutch term is > the 'long y'. Let's consider it as a broken-up, dotted, y. > Actually, to inject a historical note, I have noticed that ij is usually printed as y in French, German, and English language references to Dutch names in at least the early 1800s. I don't know anything else about the history of this orthographical practice.
adrian@mti.mti.com (Adrian McCarthy) (02/24/90)
In article <1064@kunivv1.sci.kun.nl> scribitur: >In Dutch the 'ij' is really a ligature: the lip of the 'j' >should reach under the 'i'. Very close kerning! Let's consider >this a national character. Hold the phone! My mother, who grew up in the Netherlands, told me that people often mistake a "y" with two dots over it with "ij". The mistake is easy to understand in cursive handwriting. To prove her point, my mom showed me several Dutch books and hand-written letters which had the same word. In type, it was indeed the "y" with dots, and in writing it resembled "ij". Is this "ij" ligature a big mix-up? Is this discussion really about a "y" with dots? Have typography styles in the Netherlands changed over the past 35 years, superceding the "y" with a ligature? Aid. P.S. Followups to comp.text.tex.