Re: Bad ligatures with fontenc

[Gavin Smith]

On Mon, Aug 08, 2022 at 04:36:19PM -0500, Jacob Bachmeyer wrote:
> Gavin Smith wrote:
> > In the LaTeX output, the fontenc package is used as
> > 
> > \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
> > 
> > [...]
> > 
> > It appears in whatever font fontenc is using, there is a ligature that
> > transforms ,, into a single character.
> 
> If I understand correctly, there is a convention (somewhere) for using
> above/below quotation marks; the double comma is used to represent the
> "below" closing quotation mark.  Could we put a zero-width space (some kind
> of TeX item that does not take up space) between the commas to break the
> ligature?

I believe it's German that quotes „like this“.

I've fixed it by making ,, be replaced with {,}{,}.  This is a standard
way in TeX to stop ligatures (in TeX itself, nothing to do with LaTeX).
The { and } are known as grouping characters and are a fundamental part
of TeX.  They don't have an output in of themselves so it would not be
right to think of them as "zero-width spaces".

,{}, would also work although then if you did the replacement on ,,,,
you would risk getting ,{},,{}, which would still have the ,, ligature
in the middle.

> 
> The shift operators as guillemets is the same issue.  Those are used in
> (parts of?) continental Europe as quotation marks.
> 

Also the case with ?` and !` producing the inverted question mark and
exclamation mark (for Spanish).