Friday, June 8, 2007

e-paper and publishing: legibility is a multi-faceted issue…

watchThe issue of matching e-paper technology with the needs of publishing has already been illustrated by the case of mathematical formulas and, recently, by that of the Aramaic alphabet in the “Testament des Siècles”. Before the case of hyphenation comes up, a further illustration of the issue is provided by ligatures, which I had observed when reading One Thousand And One Nights in the Pléiade collection.

Claude Peyriguère, of the French publisher Editions Hatier, to whom I mentioned the issue, gave the following details:
“The st and ct ligatures are indeed characteristic of the Pléiade books. They are related to the choice of the Garamond font. The features of this font partly derive from its former use, which rendered the style of handwriting. Unicode provides Latin ligatures (FB00 to FB06) as well as the st ligature. But, curiously enough, the ct ligature is missing.”

More information in Wikipedia.

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