Sunday 4 June 2017

Font ligatures and Space Mono

Ligatures connect two letters to one unicode character to represent something "better". This is a new feature in programming which I feel is useless twiddling. Recently I tried a monospace font 'Space Mono' which actually is a great font for programming. But for some comical reasons it has a ligature with f and i letters, forming a 'fi'. It's not even that it has any "programming" ligatures, it seems to have just that one.

Visual Studio supports ligatures, but that's the problem, you can't turn it off. It's almost as if the designer of that font knew it and included 'fi' ligature as a joke. Strangely (or is it supposed to do that?) VS still takes fi as separate letters in data (compiling), but when displaying it breaks monospacing. You thought fonts were the last thing that humanity could possibly not fuck up, but they sure did it with ligatures.

I don't know if you can somehow turn ligatures off in VS, but that's not the point. It's just plain harassing using that 'fi' ligature in a monospace (programming) font. Even it was possible to turn it off the brief moment of joy finding a good font has passed. Let's get back to Consolas or something else and hope they don't ruin it as well.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Ah crap - I found this post while googling for a way to turn off this ligature in VS. There's really no way? Agree totally, I have no idea why they included it in what would otherwise be my go-to (no pun intended) programming font

Unknown said...

OK so I opted for the brute force option, downloaded fontforge, loaded the font in, removed the glyphs for "fi" and "fl", generated a new truetype file. seems to work!

Krice said...

Well I can't download FontForge. There is some kind of subscription field, I give it e-mail but nothing happens. How fucking hard everything has to be these days? I guess there are other font editors, seems to be millions of them in google search. I just need one I can download and possibly even install.