Ligatures that don't merge glyphs together
nmsmith opened this issue · 6 comments
TL;DR
It would be nice if arrows were rendered like this:
Full motivation
I'm aware the author of this font is not a fan of "coding ligatures" that merge multiple glyphs into one. I find them quite questionable as well. Oftentimes, when programmers ask for ligatures, I suspect what they really want is just to make a sequence of characters look closer to the symbol that they are supposed to represent.
The basic example is the right arrow ->, which is used by many programming languages. In many fonts this character combination looks messy: when interpreted as an arrow, it looks badly-drawn.
Most fonts that support ligatures "fix" this issue by offering a ligature that is basically a stretched version of the → character. The main problem with this solution is that it obscures the identity of the underlying characters; it makes them look like a different character. This is especially confusing for people who are new to programming. (People know how to type - and >, but they don't know how to type an arrow.)
What programmers want is aesthetically-pleasing source code; they don't necessarily want the → character. The 0xProto font achieves the best of both worlds by offering an arrow ligature that still maintains the identity of - and >, yet more closely resembles an arrow. Here are all of the font's ligatures:
I think it would be cool if CommitMono explored this approach. IMO, it achieves a very good balance between aesthetics and simplicity. By that I mean: it would satisfy programmers who want a font with "nice arrows" (etc.), while also avoiding the dishonesty and confusion associated with fonts that merge glyphs together.
Funnily, this was actually how Commit Mono rendered coding ligatures in the early versions, but I changed the rendering to joined symbols due to popular request. Personally, I agree that the integrety of the symbols must always be kept, so the ligatures in Commit Mono are something you switch on intentionally. I doubt I will include an update to mimic the behaviour described above, as I already think symbols like -> in Commit Mono are pleasing without modifications. Hope you understand!
Ah ok. That's a shame. IMO more fonts should explore the 0xProto approach. Even Fira Code is backpedalling on their arrow ligatures.
I agree with you, but it seems there's a conflict of interest among developers on this topic.
Just to be clear, I wasn't proposing that the joined -> ligature be replaced with a non-joined one. I was merely suggesting that it would be nice to have the non-joined ligatures available via some configuration of the font. 🙂
Yes, I figured haha! Thank you for your interest, I'll see if I can make it a reality at some point.
(This is an epic font by the way. It’s the best I’ve ever seen. 👏)