On Tue, Sep 15, 2020 at 8:54 AM Mikko Rasa <
tdb@tdb.fi> wrote:
Recent versions of the ADF fonts contain an rlig (required ligatures) table
which replaces the letters ae with æ and oe with œ. This is incorrect for at
least Finnish and English and probably many other languages as well. I know
Norwegian uses the ligated versions as separate letters, but I'm not sure if
the non-ligated letter combination also appears (and so if the ligature
substitution could actually change the meaning of the text).
I'm not convinced that the ligatures are useful, since languages where those
ligated letters are used are typically able to enter the relevant Unicode
characters directly from the keyboard. And having them as required ligatures
is definitely wrong since there are many examples of using those letters
separately.
Hi Mikko,
Personally, I would concur with your assessment that by making the ligatures required, people get output text that is, shall we say, "orthographically incorrect".
However, at the project level, it seems like this is a design decision made by Arkandis. There's always *some* gray area between "it's a bug in the font" and "it's a weird-but-intentional design decision that makes the font a poor choice" and you might find that Arkandis believes (convincingly or not) that they have the right to make that design decision.... Like, if the intent was to have a font that resembles ancient Latin inscriptions, it might just be that you won't persuade them to change the feature settings.
I would highly encourage you to take the issue, as you've described it, to Arkandis directly. I think citing the confusion for real-world languages is the strongest possible argument. So they might be willing to move the substitutions into a more appropriate feature like hlig or a stylistic set.... That's worth a try because fixing it upstream would fix it for other users.
If that doesn't work, the package is "GPL2 WITH Font-Exemption" so at least it is functionally patchable. But upstream fixes would be better.
Actually, don't mean to make assumptions — did you already try reaching out to upstream? Worth a shot, IMO.
Nate