GNU bug report logs - #30331
Neither Emacs nor Vim nor Nano handle ligature literal insertion well

Previous Next

Full log

Message #14 received at 30331 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org>
To: Andrew Pennebaker <andrew.pennebaker <at> gmail.com>
Cc: vim_use <at> googlegroups.com, help-nano <at> gnu.org, 30331 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: Re: bug#30331: Neither Emacs nor Vim nor Nano handle ligature literal
 insertion well
Date: Sat, 03 Feb 2018 10:45:12 +0200

> From: Andrew Pennebaker <andrew.pennebaker <at> gmail.com>
> Date: Fri, 2 Feb 2018 16:31:05 -0600
> 
> I would really like convenient access to ligatures in my word processing software. Unfortunately, none of the
> major text editing applications appears to handle ligatures intelligently: Each of Emacs, Vim, Nano, MS Word,
> Google Drive, Libre Office, and InDesign type a dumb "ae" when the user presses the a and e keyboard keys,
> whereas historically this sequence is typically rendered with the ash æ rune.

I don't see how any text-based application could do that
automatically, since there are many cases where "ae" needs to be left
as literal 2 characters.  Just a few random examples:

  maestro
  Rafael
  (Joan) Baez

I think the right thing would be to have a special key sequence for
inserting ligatures, since the need for that is somewhat rare,
certainly more rare than the need to insert the characters literally.

Previous Next

GNU bug tracking system
Copyright (C) 1999 Darren O. Benham, 1997,2003 nCipher Corporation Ltd, 1994-97 Ian Jackson.