[Feature request]: Separate ligatures into stylistic sets per language

[gennaios]

What feature are you proposing?

Hello,

I’ve just started using MonoLisa recently as it is a great font plus it is one of the few with the character support that I need.

I use a few languages but in particular for HTML I find some ligatures are not ideal for such, e.g. >-. In such a case there could be a tag followed by a dash which I think shouldn’t be rendered as a ligature. It could be that various other languages have character combinations that might render as ligatures but are not operators in said languages.

I believe at least a handful of other fonts deal with such by separating various ligatures into different stylistic sets. Here is an example from Fira Code:

Would such be possible in the future? I would like to use ligatures but merely enable them into different configs per language.

[bebraw]

To help with the task, could you list combinations that are particularly challenging with HTML?

[gennaios]

Thank you @bebraw for considering such.

As far as I can tell, for HTML, and XHTML and perhaps XML, -< and >- render as ligatures when perhaps they shouldn't. Not counting comments <!-- -->, anything between open <tag> and close </tag> would be considered text and perhaps should render as such. Other tags that would use ligatures such as <br/> <hr/> I think are ok as is.

Perhaps it's a good idea to get the opinion of others as well as check how various other fonts separate ligatures into stylistic sets. I can't comment on such yet one example is Iosevka:

https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka/blob/main/doc/language-specific-ligation-sets.md

Another is Monaspace:

https://github.com/githubnext/monaspace

I think there may have been a few others. If I find them, I'll provide links.