The Scribe and the Longhorn
Microsoft is really teasing us with Longhorn and I am really getting impatient. I must say I was not really enthiusastic about Microsoft products so far, influenced by hearsay as well as the “Big Willy” position of MS. That being said, having worked with .Net for quite a while, I think it’s getting in the right direction. I’ve worked for quite a while with Java and I think I’m rather objective when I write such a thing. Of course, there are some drawbacks which can be very painful, but it really gets easy to have things up and running.
Anyway, back to the point, Longhorn has thought of typography. It provides through XAML in Avalon elements to support “quality typographic presentation to the user”. The Typography class gathers properties to provide typographic features, such as StandardLigatures.
The whole lot is based on OpenType, developed jointly by Adobe and MS in a cross-platform perspective – OpenType fonts can be used on Mac. It is based on Unicode, thus providing a greater support for world’s languages and ligatures and real small-caps.
With such a support, the question is: will it be used in its full strength? I cannot imagine developers, who are not even aware of the existence of ligatures in this world, getting worried about ligatures or small-caps. They are the ones today who don’t even see there’s something wrong with a quote such as “ ‘ ”.
