At 12:18 +0200 2001/05/14, jbezos wrote:
>> >For example, removing the fi ligature in Turkish. Or using an alternate
>> >ortography in languages with contextual analysis.
>>
>> That doesn't seem like metric transformations to me, but more like
>
>Actually, they aren't, but for some reason Knuth
>very likely understands, this information is included
>in the tfm files (text font *metrics*).

One reason could be that ligatures can be viewed as an extreme form of
kerning: For example, the "f" and "i" are kerned together until their
rendering becomes a single character.

This is in fact good, because one could think of automated forms of kerning
(say making use of character renderings which are not square boxes or
something), and if the information already is in the metrics file, that
will become possible.

  Hans Aberg