[comp.text.tex] Summary of "How can I get rid of Ligatures in plain.tex?"

chiu@brahms.amd.com (Timothy Chiu) (02/27/91)

From my original posting:
>When I'm done, the document will be edited by people who
>don't know the first thing about TeX so, I'm trying to
>keep the formatting down to a minimum.  But because I'm
>using an Adobe font, all "fi"'s and "fl"'s have to
>be typed as "f{}i" or "f{}l", which is a real pain.  If
>I don't type them this way they don't show up.  The 
>equivalent of '014 and '015 in Times-Roman is a blank.
>
>Is there someway I can turn off the ligature function in
>plain.tex in a macro at the beginning of the document so
>I won't have to type the "{}" (which is the workaround
>D. Knuth suggests in the TeXbook)? 

The responses I got varied.  The three most prominent were:

1) Use dvips 5.47 (by Tomas Rokicki) from labrea.stanford.edu,
	which has corrected Adobe TFM fonts.  The files you 
	need are dvips547.tar.Z and dvipslib.tar.Z  (Note: 
	this solution does not remove ligatures, rather the 
	font substitutes the letters for the ligatures.)

2) Teach TeX where ligatures are in the PostScript font,
	apparently 174 and 175 decimal and '256 and '257 
	octal.  I received no examples of this and I'm not
	sure how one goes about doing this.

3) Convert the TFM to a PL font, edit the PL font to remove
	the ligature rules, and then convert back to a 
	TFM font.

I did receive one macro that redefined all letters to do a `{}'
after typesetting themselves.  If anyone is interested, send
me e-mail.  I ended installing dvips5.47 which is a suitable
workaround to my problem.

Many thanks to:

Tomas Rokicki 		rokicki@neon.stanford.edu
Karl Berry   		karl@cs.umb.edu
Steve Graham 		graham@isis.ee.washington.edu
Raymond Chen 		raymond@math.berkeley.edu
Ron Parker   		phys59@jetson.uh.edu
Steve Vavasis		vavasis@cs.cornell.edu
Berthold K.P. Horn	bkph@ai.mit.edu
Lee Hetherington	ilh@goldilocks.lcs.mit.edu
--
Timothy Chiu        | "Some bookes are to bee tasted, others to bee swallowed,
chiu@brahms.amd.com | and some few to bee chewed and digested." -Francis Bacon
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