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<DIV>Working as I am from an internet cafe in Rimini, I can't go into detail, but I am</DIV>
<DIV>sure that the use of a boundary character would work. I do something like that</DIV>
<DIV>for the final sigma in Ibycus, and it has to distinguish between following punctuation in+two classes, and folllowing space. The details are in the Metafont files for Ibycus.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Pierre MacKay</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<BLOCKQUOTE style="PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #1010ff 2px solid">-------------- Original message -------------- <BR><BR>> I only want to make the <BR>> substitution if the next character is a space <BR>> <BR>> If it's ok to make the substitution at the end of a word, you could <BR>> perhaps use word boundary ligatures. They're described in the vf and MF <BR>> documentation somewhere. But it seems like these putative fancy swashes <BR>> wouldn't go well with a comma or period following. <BR>> <BR>> I cannot quite picture how to detect a following space at the font <BR>> level. I think it would have to be done at the macro level, and even <BR>> there it's not trivial. <BR>> <BR>> always turn an 'n' followed by a space into a fancy 'n' and then <BR>> kern a little but wouldn't this interfere with the normal interword <BR>> spacing that TeX tries to do? <BR>> <BR>> Yes (even if it could be done). <BR>> <BR>> Would this part of the code even see the space? I'm guessing it <BR>> doesn't. <BR>> <BR>> Right. There is no "space character" per se by the time TeX is <BR>> typesetting fonts, the <SPACE>(catcode 10) characters have turned into <BR>> interword glue, and you can't make a ligature with that. <BR>> <BR>> On a related note the font also has a "ct" ligature. How can I make <BR>> sure it doesn't use this at the end of a word? <BR>> <BR>> That should be doable with boundary ligatures. At a word boundary, <BR>> typeset c, t. At a non-boundary, typeset the ct ligature. <BR>> <BR>> I set it up so that I need 'n', space, space (can you say ugly) to turn <BR>> it on? <BR>> <BR>> With TeX macros, it could potentially be done. But TeX collapses <BR>> multiple spaces into one very early. So unless you typeset the whole <BR>> thing with \obeyspaces ... argh, it just gets worse. <BR>> <BR>> What I don't like about this is I change the entire <BR>> font for the document then I need to r
emove all of them. <BR>> <BR>> Well, if it's done with macros (\ct, \finaln, etc.), the macros could <BR>> perhaps be redefined to always do the standard thing (just insert "ct", <BR>> "n") with other fonts. Still a drag, though, I agree. <BR>> <BR>> <BR>> You might try posting to tex-fonts@math.utah.edu if no other leads are <BR>> forthcoming, there are some other font folks there who don't read texhax. <BR>> <BR>> Happy swashing, <BR>> karl <BR>> <BR>> _______________________________________________ <BR>> TeX FAQ: http://www.tex.ac.uk/faq <BR>> TeX newsgroup: http://groups.google.com/groups?group=comp.text.tex <BR>> Mailing list archives: http://tug.org/pipermail/texhax/ <BR>> More links: http://tug.org/begin.html <BR>> <BR>> Automated subscription management: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/texhax <BR>> Human mailing list managers: postmaster@tug.org </BLOCKQUOTE></body></html>