Re: "Kerning?" (fwd)

[Peter Evans peterev@xxxxxxxx]

Dick Weltz, whose other erudite comments surely qualify him for invitation
to participate directly in this mailing list, writes:

> it is likely that kerning ["i" and "j"] . . . caused the
> compterniks who designed the ASCII character set to imagine that there
> really is such a character as a y with dieresis (no such animal in any
> modern language).

[Polite cough.] No such animal in the ASCII character set, either. But OK,
I see what he means: it's in the IBM something-something code page. I
hadn't realized just how superfluous it was. What a delightful and
surprising touch of humor for IBM to have provided us with it. After Lewis
Carroll dreamt up "chortle", "galumph" and others they were gratefully
adopted by later scriveners; it's now up to us to find ways to exploit
IBM's graphemic contribution to the world.