> The tangent in (1) on how they contradict unicode could have been skipped as well Not only because confusables already exist, but also because (as I said[1]

> The tangent in (1) on how they contradict unicode could have been skipped as well Not only because confusables already exist, but also because (as I said[1] the previous time this was posted) covering all ligatures used in all typographical styles is very much a non-goal of Unicode. The official position is that the font shaping layer[2] sits atop Unicode’s semantic representation and is free to ligate, spindle, or mutilate it for display however it prefers (at least for Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic it’s a preference; other scripts can’t be rendered at all without doing it, such as Arabic—barring the legacy presentational forms—or Burmese[3]). The only reason Unicode even has those ligatures is that some IBM encodings (which were more presentational in nature) encoded them, and the IBM employees who wrote a large part of the early standard (based on the decades of i18n experience they had at that point) wanted roundtripping. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29639966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29639966 [2] https://github.com/n8willis/opentype-shaping-documents https://github.com/n8willis/opentype-shaping-documents [3] https://r12a.github.io/scripts/mymr/my.html#compositeV https://r12a.github.io/scripts/mymr/my.html#compositeV