Ligatures in programming fonts: hell no

• opentype-shaping-documents

  2 159 6.8 HTML

  Documentation of OpenType shaping behavior

> The tangent in (1) on how they contradict unicode could have been skipped as well

Not only because confusables already exist, but also (as I already said[1] the previous time this was posted) covering all ligatures used in all typographical styles is very much a non-goal of Unicode. The official position is that the font shaping layer[2] sits atop Unicode’s semantic representation and is free to ligate, spindle, or mutilate it for display however it prefers (at least for Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic it’s a preference; other scripts can’t be rendered at all without doing it, such as Arabic—barring the legacy presentational forms—or Burmese[3]).

The only reason Unicode even has those ligatures is that some IBM encodings (which were more presentational in nature) encoded them, and IBM employees wrote a large part of the early standard (based on the decades of i18n experience they had at that point) and wanted roundtripping.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29639966

[2] https://github.com/n8willis/opentype-shaping-documents

[3] https://r12a.github.io/scripts/mymr/my.html#combiningV

• 3270font

  12 1,681 0.0 Python

  A 3270 font in a modern format

Is there a way to add programming ligatures to an existing font, similar to how Nerd Font patches existing fonts to add useful terminal glyphs like the Powerline symbols¹? I would love to have a ligatured version of that font https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font

1) the last sentence of the article implies that the author of the article abhor them as much as programming ligatures. I don't understand why but preference in taste, color, esthetic are not objective, nor absolute, so I am not the one to judge him.

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