Using ZWNJ ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER in practice

[Jukka K. Korpela]

 William_J_G Overington wrote:

I had the word 'distinctive' so as to get a ligature for 'st' and a
> ligature for 'ct' in a design for a greetings card.
>
> In the event, the result was that the ligature for 'is'  prevented the
> ligature for 'st' being displayed.
>

This looks natural to me: when a program is applying ligatures, it processes
the text sequentially, so it detects that there is a ligature for “is” in
the font,
so it uses it (when there is no ligature for the longer sequence “ist”).

(I didn’t quite understand in which software you used this, but I tested it
in Word 365, with the EB Garamond installed and with historical ligatures
enabled in font settings in Word.)

And it is typical intended use for ZWNJ to break a character pair so that
a ligature is not used for. This in turn causes “st” to be detected as pair
for which there is a ligature.

ZWNJ could also be used to prevent a ligature in a context where it is not
desired for some reason and program settings in general have enabled
ligatures
for the text. In typesetting, you would probably just select a piece of
text and
turn ligatures off, but ZWNJ handles the issue at the character level and
might
therefore be better in some case (e.g., it might be carried from a word
processor
to a typesetting problem—ot it might not),

Jukka K. Korpela
https://jkorpela.fi
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