🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Aug20.013444.6313@adobe.com> mmwang@adobe.com (Michael Wang) writes:
>In the case of document portability, I don't feel that Unicode and
>ligatures are unrelated issues. On the Macintosh, there may be (will
>be) something in the OS that allows automatic substitution of ligatures
>for letter combinations, but what about other platforms? If I create
>a document with a Mac application that uses the Line Layout manager to
>handle ligature substitution and transfer it to another platform that
>doesn't have QuickDraw GX, I'm not going to get the ligatures.

I guess this is the crux of my argument. Is your intent to preserve the
*appearance* of your text, or simply the *content*? If you're trying
to preserve the precise appearance, then why treat it as text at all? Why
not just transmit a bitmap (or Postscript file or Interpress master or...)
and be done with it? If, on the other hand, your job is to render a
simple stream of text that you're receiving, then the model I propose
works just fine--any system (GX or not) will be able to at least minimally
render a stream of Unicodes. Some will be able to give some typographic
elegance at rendering time, and others won't. Some may have richer fonts, and
others won't. In any event the Unicodes at the base of the process are
as simple as possible: they just encode meaning, not appearance.

Dave Opstad
Line Layout Weenie