The history of luaTEX 2006–2009 / v 0.50 - Pragma ADE

XX
Nice to know
XX.I
Tricky ligatures
Getting the 1.06 release of Latin Modern out in the wild took some discussion and testing.
Not only were the names (internal names as well as le names) changed in such a way that
multiple paplications could deal with it, but also some more advanced ligature trickery
was added.
\definefontfeature
[ijtest]
[mode=node,
script=latn,language=nld,strategy=3,
liga=yes,kern=yes]
\definefont
[ijfont]
[name:lmroman10regular*ijtest at 36pt]
\start \ijfont \setstrut fijn ijsje fiets flink effe\stop
This bit of Dutch shows up as:
fijn ijsje fiets flink effe
Do you see the trick? There are both an ij and an ligature, but we need to prevent the
ij ligature in jn. Of course not all fonts have this feature, which indicated that you can
never depend on it.
XX.II
Herds
A while ago, Duane, Taco and I published the Cow Font. It's non--trivial to cook up a
font made of cows, but of course Mojca Miklavec (who else) wants to typeset something
Slovenian in this font. Now, the problem is that in MkIV we don't have fallback characters,
or more precisely, we don't make utf characters active and accent composing commands
are mapped onto utf.
This means that nothing will show up when we have no characters in the dened fonts.
For the moment we stick to simple virtual fonts but because we can use node lists in virtual
fonts, in the near future we will cook up a way to create arbitrary fallback characters.
The following example demonstrates how to ‘complete’ a font that misses glyphs.
Nice to know 163