[Fontinst] LIG plus kerning

[Ulrich Dirr]

Lars Hellström wrote:
>> But it looks like that the kerning information for, e.g.,
>> 'zero'+'ellipsis' is discarded. It will only be kerned when the
>> 'ellipsis' char is entered directly but not with the ligature mechanism.
>> Is there a way to get this nevertheless?
> 
> Not really, since this is a fundamental limitation of the TeX ligaturing
> mechanism: kerns and ligatures are formed in a single pass over the text,
> so the right hand side of a kerning or ligature pair will always be a raw
> character. (Maybe you can get it right if you do something really clever
> with the more exotic ligaturing instructions and additional dummy
> characters, but that it most likely not worth the trouble.)
> 
>> Can I combine this 'two-step'-ligatures with individual kerning pairs?
> 
> Kerns to its right will work as usual. Kerns on its left have no effect
> since the ligature has not yet been formed when that kern position is
> considered. 
> 
> Similar problems occur in the T1 encoding for the >> and << ligatures.

That's bad news. So I've to find a 'nice' looking char for direct input
(the ANSI dec133 is already used by another glyph). And a macro solution
like \dots would make the input file unreadable because 'ellipsis' is used
heavily.

 
>> BTW What is the difference between 'latin' and 'newlatin' (v1.926),
which
>> one is to be preferred, or where can I read about it?
> 
> You can start by LaTeXing newlatin.mtx.
> 
>> (it looks like small
>> caps fonts are spaced out a bit more with newlatin)
> 
> Not impossible. newlatin.mtx should be more consistent about which sets
of
> glyphs it uses, and this may make such a difference.

Ok, thanks.

Best regards,
Ulrich Dirr