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From: marcel@cs.caltech.edu (Marcel van der Goot)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: questions about creating virtual font files
Message-ID: <1990Oct15.235715.17666@nntp-server.caltech.edu>
Date: 15 Oct 90 23:57:15 GMT
References: <22927.9010121655@manutius.ecs.soton.ac.uk>
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In <22927.9010121655@manutius.ecs.soton.ac.uk> Sebastian Rahtz
(S.P.Q.Rahtz@ecs.soton.ac.uk) asks (among other, more complicated things):

> 3) can one of you character gurus tell me about the `ij' ligature? do
>    the letters actually join up?

Now, I don't pretend to be a character guru, and I'm not quite sure
if this is what you refer to:

In Dutch the combination `ij' is probably best considered a single letter.
(proof: Unlike other combinations of letters with a single sound, such
as `ch' and `oe', it is always capitalized as `IJ', never as `Ij'.)
For TeX purposes it should indeed be considered a ligature. In a roman
font it is printed as just the combination `i' `j', but in some
other, italic, fonts, there is a single symbol. When written by hand
it looks like (in comp. modern) {\it\"y} (I have never seen anyone
write `ij' by hand). However, it never looks like {\sl\"y}; i.e.,
the tail of the y is one with a curve, not a slanted one. I have
indeed seen books where the `ij' was a single letter. I'm afraid
you'll have to find a Dutch book that contains italic text for this.

(I have here
  Robert Byron, William Shetter:
  Een goed begin ---: a contemporary Dutch reader
  The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff (1978)
from the Caltech library --- if they have it {\sl there} they might
have it in your local library as well. It has an `ij' like {\it\"y} and
a `y' like {\sl y}.)

I'd say that for non-Dutch text, you would not want to turn `ij' into
this ligature since there it probably just stands for an `i' followed
by a `j'.

Aside: On mechanical Dutch typewriters they often had a single key
with the ligature `ij' to improve the spacing of those two narrow characters
in a fixed-width font.

Another aside: They used to build dot matrix printers where they had
saved memory by lowering the `j' so that the dot was at x-height instead
of above the line. The `i' however had the dot in the normal place. As
a result you could not print Dutch on those printers.


Now, to add more to Sebastian's questions: I would like to print a
document containing both English and Dutch paragraphs. For the Dutch
parts I would like to make the `ij' into a ligature, to make input {``}
produce a lowered {''}, and to add a ligature for `fj' (you mean,
Knuth's dictionary doesn't contain ``fjord''?!?). Is there a way to
do that without having to load a whole separate set of fonts for
the Dutch text? Are virtual fonts the way to do this, or is there
something simpler, just with macros? Does one need to understand
MetaFont to use virtual fonts, or are the two unrelated?


					Marcel van der Goot
					marcel@cs.caltech.edu