Fonts with a Long s?

[gerald_giampa]

Thomas,


Your words,
.>>>>>
These are two separate questions. OpenType is capable of any arbitrary ligature a type designer cares to create. However, I don't know if Sabon has the f_j ligature. Some Adobe fonts have it, but far from all.
>>>>>

I am not that easy to brush off.

Sabon, having an historical base "may" predate the development of j and was still just a consonant value for the i. But I am merely guessing. Also one must consider the "mother tongue" issue of the type face and I do not believe that combination would ever get inked. There will be some in this forum familiar with the language to explain that. I am all for

[John Hudson]

Will they still be using the old method for ligatures where the spell checkers give gobbly gook? That the "disadvantages" are still the "same as ever".

No. Ligatures in OT fonts are automatically substituted at the glyph processing level: spell-checking is performed at the character processing level. This article might answer more of your questions about OpenType.

[gerald_giampa]

John,

Thank you. This is helpful.


Gerald Giampa

[gerald_giampa]

I have been poking around the Open Type features, also I got a mysterious letter. Maybe there is something to it.


Gerald Giampa

[laurie]

I am new to this list and have only one specific interest which concerns the 'long s'. I hope someone can help.

"1791: John Bell, U.K. printer, abandons the "long s" (the "s" that looks like an "f")"
>
> I was interested in the spelling rules that existed at the time writers used the 'long s'.
> I have been reading old documents from various archives and I have seen many examples of the 'long s'.

> Example: ". . . and to ship myfelf upon the firft Veffel or Ship . . ."
>
> Can anyone refer me to any spelling rules that would explain when the 'f' was substituted for 's'.
>
> Lawrence C. Erwin,
> Toronto

[John Hudson]

The orthographic rules for long s vary from language to language. In English, the typical rule is as follows:

long s : beginning of a word; mid-word; first s in a double

short s : end of a word, second s in a double

fo fend mifsals to fifters in fouth-eaft Afia

[laurie]

Thank you John Hudson. That was the information I needed.

[Nick Shinn]

>1791: John Bell, U.K. printer, abandons the "long s"

But why? From a practical point of view, according to the orthography of the day, there would have been many more long s's in a tray, so economically, it would have made more sense to rationalize by abandoning the short s.

And from the reader's point of view, it would have been less of shock.

But perhaps they wanted drastic change.

Did a standards committee of the era recommend a compromise, medium-length s, to replace both?

Figures changed from old-style to lining, but were there other proposed orthographic changes during that revolutionary era, that didn't catch on? (I'm thinking of glyph shapes, including punctuation, rather than phonetic systems such as Pitman's, which was 1830s, I think).