Some Private Use Area code points for ligatures.

There follows a transcript of an email that I posted to the discussion group at unicode@unicode.org on Saturday 25 May 2002, following some discussion in the discussion group on previous days that week.

The discussion group is free to join, joining instructions can be found at the http://www.unicode.org website.

Readers interested in the nature of the Private Use Area in the Unicode system may like to look in chapter 13, section 13.5 of the Unicode specification, which document is available in pdf format from the http://www.unicode.org website.

William Overington

Monday 27 May 2002

Some Private Use Area code points for ligatures.

Unicode at present has some ligature characters and also a long s on its own and the German Eszett character.

The long s on its own is encoded in Unicode as U+017F and the Eszett as U+00DF.

Unicode currently has the ligatures ff, fi, fl, ffi, ffl, long s t and st at U+FB00 through to U+FB06.

There is presently a policy of not adding any further ligature characters to regular Unicode.

However, as there are some situations where a set of such ligature characters would be useful, here are some Private Use Area code points for ligatures, provided in the hope of being helpful to end users of the Unicode system who might like to have a list of code points for such ligatures.

This list, the code points being entirely the choice of the present author, is published by the present author. The code points chosen are only as consistent amongst end users as end users choose to make them. These code points are not a "standard". They are simply provided on the basis that a list is better than no list, in that the existence of a list will hopefully encourage interest in these ligature characters as part of our typographic heritage and hopefully help in any efforts to computerise ligature characters being as portable as possible.

The list is intended to include sufficient ligatures for German Fraktur and 18th Century English printing.

U+E707 ct
U+E708 ch
U+E709 ck
U+E70A fh
U+E70B fj
U+E70C ft
U+E70D ll
U+E70E tt
U+E70F tz

U+E750 long sb
U+E751 long sch
U+E752 long sh
U+E753 long si
U+E754 long sk
U+E755 long sl
U+E756 long s long s
U+E757 long s long s i
U+E758 long s long s l

William Overington

25 May 2002