🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1064@kunivv1.sci.kun.nl> scribitur:

>In Dutch the 'ij' is really a ligature: the lip of the 'j'
>should reach under the 'i'. Very close kerning! Let's consider
>this a national character.

In doing research for a type design project, I noticed the ij 
ligature appearing in all sorts of contexts, but never with anything
more than "i-j ligature" to identify it. Now I at least know the 
language responsible for this.

Also, in every typeface that I saw this combination occur, it appeared 
that the i and j of the ligature were identical to the ordinary i and
j. The ligature status appears to be an artifact of a time when the
close kerning described wasn't possible (think about TeX's boxes and
imagine they can't overlap and there's your typesetting problem with
ij).

Now, does ij-lig occur every time i+j appears or only sometimes? (in
Latin, for example, \oe is only used if oe represents a dipthong. Thus
p\oe{}na, but poeta.) If it occurs every time, then an implicit kern
would be more efficient than a ligature (they both need a different TFM
from CM, but the former needs no additional glyphs). If it occurs only
sometimes, \def\ij{i\kern-<something>j} would work but would prohibit
hyphenation (the accent/hyphenation problem isn't because of accents,
per se, but because TeX does not hyphenate words with explicit kerns),
so in this case, having an ij national character would make sense.

-dh
-- 
"Odi et amo, quare id faciam, fortasse requiris?
   nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior"          -Catullus
D.A. Hosek.                        UUCP: uunet!jarthur!dhosek
                               Internet: dhosek@hmcvax.claremont.edu