Path: csiph.com!newsfeed.hal-mli.net!feeder3.hal-mli.net!newsfeed.hal-mli.net!feeder1.hal-mli.net!feeder.erje.net!eu.feeder.erje.net!news.swapon.de!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail From: Gregory Ewing Newsgroups: comp.lang.python Subject: Re: Python Unicode handling wins again -- mostly Date: Sun, 01 Dec 2013 11:37:30 +1300 Lines: 22 Message-ID: References: <529934dc$0$29993$c3e8da3$5496439d@news.astraweb.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: individual.net wDceSs8RnKzJBBFPk2PG6A4T73G4nbXfyECXQF7x/W967FBqHt Cancel-Lock: sha1:2ZY85zrpy00CzGxW5J6VcHPozdg= User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.5 (Macintosh/20050711) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en In-Reply-To: Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.python:60809 wxjmfauth@gmail.com wrote: > And do you know the origin of this typographical feature? > Because, mechanically, the dot of the "i" broke too often. > > In my opinion, a very plausible explanation. It doesn't sound very plausible to me, because there are a lot more stand-alone 'i's in English text than there are ones following an f. What is there to stop them from breaking? It's more likely to be simply a kerning issue. You want to get the stems of the f and the i close together, and the only practical way to do that with mechanical type is to merge them into one piece of metal. Which makes it even sillier to have an 'ffi' character in this day and age, when you can simply space the characters so that they overlap. -- Greg