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From: eijkhout@s41.csrd.uiuc.edu (Victor Eijkhout)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: How to substitute for a ligature?
Message-ID: <1991May3.185937.11875@csrd.uiuc.edu>
Date: 3 May 91 18:59:37 GMT
References: <1991May3.211126.5326@lure.latrobe.edu.au>
Sender: news@csrd.uiuc.edu (news)
Organization: UIUC Center for Supercomputing Research and Development
Lines: 34

ecogk@lure.latrobe.edu.au (Gabor Korosi) writes:

>Hi Gurus,

Hi there :-)

>Hungarian, like many other European languages (the only exception on the
>continent I am aware of is French) uses the right English double quote 
>shifted down to the baseline as left double quote. (That is ,,example'' 
>instead of ``example''.) This is the "12 character in dx fonts. Is there 
>any way to force TeX to use this character for the ligature `` rather than
>the English default?

Yes. Unfortunately you have to go outside TeX.
I suggest you dive into the tfm format and find out
how ligatures work. Use the 'tftopl' program to convert
a .tfm file to a .pl file, which is readable.
Then edit that, and translate back with 'pltotf'.

As an example, here is a fragment from cmr10.pl,
describing the ligatures of 'f' followed by 'i', 'f',
and 'l'.

(LIGTABLE
   (LABEL C f)
   (LIG C i O 14)
   (LIG C f O 13)
   (LIG C l O 15)

You see how 'fi' gets replaced by 'octal 14' et cetera.

Happy hacking!

Victor.