Okay, and I will tie this in part to the Irish language, too.

I'm wondering about the use of ligatures in english and Irish. Most specifically the double-s (ß). I've read that at one time it was used in printing modern english, but as I don't have any books in my collection before 1760, I can't seem to verify that since if it ever *was* used, it would have fallen into disuse decades before that. I know that the ct, st and others (fi fl æ œ) persisted for quite some time afterward in english, but was ß used in the early days, and when was it stopped?

Now here's where I tie this to Irish. Other than the tironian et (7) and the ampersand (&), to what extent were ligatures used in Irish?

And lastly, before unicode really became big, and had a nifty combining-dot-above, I remember some old ms word versions had a non-combining-dot-above. A combination of keys that when pressed would place a dot above the previous letter, witout actually combining into a single glyph. While the dot placement was generic and not always perfect with all letters, it would allow me to use the dot with fonts that don't have combined glyphs for dotted consonants. Most spefically I'm using Dominican, so when I place a dotted consonant, it reverts to lucida grande.

Any advice or answers is greatly appreciated.

le buíochas

http://www.gaelchlo.org/bunnod.html

Unfortunately the page describing the Nodanna is offline at the moment

Here is a copy in the wayback machine:
http://web.archive.org/web/20060515032052/http://www.fainne.org/noda/

GRMA.