VMs: Re: Weirdoes, ligatures

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Rene,

> If a word in the VMs looks like qokeey, but the
> two e-s are actually connected (at the bottom)
> then it can be written qok(ee)y , which, I think
> is rather clear.

Cool! :-) I really like the () ligature notation, it's just a shame that it 
hasn't been used more (it's not a thing I'd noticed before, but I'm sure 
I'm not the only person here who hadn't).

Any glyph representation would simply have an unambiguous one-to-one 
remapping to/from a bracketed EVA sequence - which is extraordinarily easy 
to code/decode, even in JavaScript. :-)

To my eyes, this ease of transformability removes any need for additional 
parallel VMS font renderings - loop-variant <ch>'s aside. Input it as 
glyphs or EVA, n'importe quoi - but store it as strokes, with ligature 
bracketing.

>  To have it come out ligatured
> in the TT font, one should write instead:
> qokEey. This is not so intuitive, but works.
> VTT is a tool that can convert between the two
> representations.

It's a pretty simple set of transformations, which can be done easily by 
pretty much any page-generation tool (if the data exists in its database, 
which is rarely the case, sadly).

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....