🚀 go-pugleaf

Dov Grovgeld writes about Unicode:

Of course it doesn't solve typographical problems of all languages
of the world, and that was never its intended purpose. Does it e.g.
include the ligatures of Arabic? Each character in arabic can appear
in four different forms. It certainly doesn't solve the problems of
attaching vowels to Hebrew, which appear as dots above and below the
characters. It certainly doesn't solve the problems of mathematical
typesetting layout.

ah.. but the Unicode revisions will include a large number of arabic
ligatures. And upon request of the National body it will include a large number
of Korean Hangul composite characters. In fact, it seems it will include
ligatures from any non-european script. It won't include a large set of
european ligatures though. Just some. 

The standard is a political compromise between the minimal encoding for
linguistic purposes and the practical desire to subsume most computer
character sets. Note that the unicode spec already includes zapf dingbats,
p.c vector characters and 2 dot leaders. Unfortunately it doesn't include
the rest of the common ligatures such as those in the Adobe Expert Set.
Those will undoubtably be added by typographic vendors as private extensions.
What's sadder is that old style ( ranging) figures aren't distinguished from lining figures that are the standard ascii fare. That means that when those are added into the private repetoire they'll miss being recognized by various functions that are numerically sensitive. Of course, they've always been wedged into
font mapping for 8 bit codes, but this an old attempt to live with
 the limits of 8 bit encoding.

Nick Nussbaum