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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
(Score: 1) by Arik on Monday July 24 2017, @07:12PM
One day a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the streets.
"I have a supposedly fixed-width font, cannot remember which one it is, Fantasque Sans Mono or Liberation Mono maybe?, that combines for example two adjacent "f"s into a single character (and exactly one character, keeping with the monospace indication, if ligatures are compatible with monospace at all, which I see is debatable)."
What a strange notion, that someone put in the work to make something like that happen on purpose.
"The combined ligature character is certainly monospace and does not break kerning, but I think I agree that it's just not right!"
Agreed, it's a font creating a ligature on its own and that is just not right.
Just don't confuse this with normal ligatures. Æ should be a ligature because I typed it that way, but if you had a font (a font!) going through and effectively doing a s/ae/æ routine without being asked, that would be messed up. The closest thing to a double 'f' I can think of that gets typed on purpose is ß - that's actually a double 's' but depending on your font it could like very 'f'ish.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?