Re: China: Government Starts Phasing Out American Processors, Operating Systems on Government Computers

kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) writes:

You also would see a lot of weird ligatures back then which are seldom
seen today.   Some of that stuff didn't actually disappear until automated
typesetting came along, as there are only so many keys on the linotype.

I'm seeing instances of ligature in on-line docs, ff, fi, ffi, fl, ffl
and even st.  (I understand the reasoning behind the existence of the
f-ligatures but not st, less so why it would be used in an electronic
doc.)

This actually turns out to be an embuggerance.  The most recent
version of xpdf (PDF reader for Linux) I have, when given a text
search request for "Kauffmann" will fail to return any instances.  But
(knowing that Kauffmann was an important relevant author) a quick look
at the bibliography revealed multiple instances among other found on
reading full text.

The PDF author had used used the ff ligature from whatever
$CURRENTLY-KEWL-CHARSET which was rendered readably.  But the xpdf
author wasn't clueful enough to realize that no user ever enters a
ligature character code from the keyboard as a search target and write
compensating translations into the source code.

--
Mike Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada