Faking ff ligatures

[Paul Thompson]

There is something extremely Carrollian about this whole discussion.

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Paul A. Thompson               |Do not go gentle into that good night.
Assoc. Prof., Div Biostatistics|Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Washington Univ. St. Louis     |Dylan Thomas


On Thu, 24 Sep 1998, Rebecca and Rowland wrote:

> >> \movert{\neg{\scale{\width{f}}{250}}}
> >
> >This _is_ absolutely insane.
> 
> Righto.
> 
> >Don't mismatch `faking' the ligature ff, which is an impossible task
> >(if it was possible, the whole ligature business would have vanished
> >in occidental typography, don't you believe?), and filling-in the ff
> >slot in O/T1 encodings for (??) compatibility or strict
> >compliance. What fontinst does is rather perverse: use tex's
> >auto-ligaturing mechanism + VPL power to automagically replace the
> >string ff by ... the same string exactly how it would have been printed
> >without the TeX+VF power!
> 
> Ah...  I see.  So in those cases where I have horrible-looking combinations
> of ffl and ffi, I would have got exactly the same appearance without the
> ffl and ffi faked ligatures.  The solution seems to me to be this: in those
> cases where a fount ends up with horrible-looking ffl and ffi `ligatures'
> made up of a real fi or fl ligature preceded by an `f', the best fix is to
> replace the `fi' and `fl' ligatures (in ffl and ffi only) with `f' `i' and
> `f' `l'.
>