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Q: Ligatures in Programming Fonts? A: Hell No

posted by Fnord666 on Monday July 24 2017, @03:39AM   Printer-friendly
from the not-no-but-... dept.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Ligatures in programming fonts — a misguided trend I was hoping would collapse under its own illogic. But several readers have already sent me this new argument in favor.

Let me save you some time:

Ligatures in programming fonts are a terrible idea.

And not because I’m a purist or a grump. (Some days, but not today.) Programming code has special semantic considerations. Ligatures in programming fonts are likely to either misrepresent the meaning of the code, or cause miscues among readers. So in the end, even if they’re cute, the risk of error isn’t worth it.

There are good reasons we have Unicode and this is NOT one of them.

Source: http://tinyletter.com/mbutterick/letters/q-ligatures-in-programming-fonts-a-hell-no

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24 2017, @02:02PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24 2017, @02:02PM (#543685)

    Sounds like X-Symbol in Emacs. Except that it is not used on programming languages, but on typesetting languages like LaTeX and HTML, to show the real symbol (say, ä) on screen where the encoding (like \"a in LaTeX or ä in HTML) occurs in text. It also can translate letters into their encodings, and sometimes even combines several letters into one symbol (including in cases where you don't want it; I can't count the number of times where I wanted to write e.g. \ref{eq:anything} and ended up with \ref{eqänything} because X-Symbol decided to translate :a into ä — but not frequent enough for me to search for how to disable specific transformations; I ended up typing colon-space-backspace-a in those cases).

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24 2017, @07:48PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24 2017, @07:48PM (#543860)

    Similar was built into early typesetting software Scribe / Scribble (the DOS version), then into FinalWordII and Borland Sprint wordprocessing. To get the math symbols I wanted, I could combine characters to overprint. Also allowed substitution of printable characters for something that would display on a VT100 character mapped screen -- I'd look at some odd extended-ascii symbol, but print the Greek I wanted on paper or to Postscript.

    At the top of the master file (for some big manual) there was a block of definitions.