search

alerque / libertinus

The Libertinus font family
Other
928 stars 57 forks source link

The Th ligature doesn't show on the Kindle. #483

Open Lululalu opened 2 years ago

Lululalu commented 2 years ago

It used to work with the Linux Libertine font.

alerque commented 2 years ago

See issue #104 (and other issues linked there). It is no longer enabled by default, but can easily be enabled by using enabling the discretionary ligature set (+dlig) in OpenType. I don't know what Kindle model or document format you are using or how you are getting the font files over there, but now at least you know the name of the feature you are looking for.

Lululalu commented 2 years ago

I download the files from the Github and drag and dropped them into the font folder of my Kindle 10.

dead10ck commented 2 years ago

@alerque I came looking here for the same reason. I looked up the Libertine font and saw that this project was the successor, since Libertine became abandoned, and was happy that this project exists to continue it. But the very first thing I noticed was the absent Th ligature, which saddened me.

I can appreciate that some folks don't like the Th ligature, and that is a perfectly valid individual preference. But the font had it for, what, 15 years? before it was removed here. From a purely technical perspective, moving a ligature like that to a set that is intended for "discretionary" ligatures, based on preference, seems like a very sound choice. That is its purpose, after all, right?

But the reality is that the number of applications that support OpenType features—outside of professional software in design, programming, etc.—is vanishingly small. People can't twiddle OpenType knobs on their Kindles, ebook reader apps, web browsers (without technical skill), PDFs, word processors (without taking the steps to go out of your way to find these knobs' existence in the menus, or expressly searching for it online), and surely countless other examples I'm not thinking of. For all intents and purposes, for many many applications, relegating this ligature to dlig is effectively removing it from the font altogether.

Which, as the author of this fork, is certainly your prerogative. Don't get me wrong here, you are doing the work to keep this font alive, which deserves a lot of appreciation. But people will have opinions on Twitter. You are only ever going to hear from people who think something should be different. You said in another issue that you don't want to flip flop based on who is "the squeakiest wheel." But that's exactly what you did to begin with. You've changed a long standing stylistic characteristic of a font that's been around for nearly 2 decades, many of which were happy with the Th ligature.

So you probably shouldn't be surprised if you get duplicate issues about this for as long as you choose to maintain this font.

Crissov commented 2 years ago

Out of curiosity (and somewhat off-topic), I tried to find out which OpenType font features Amazon Kindles support and how to enable them. I wasn’t very successful, but was surprised that according to the Kindle Publishing Guidelines, Enhanced Typesetting (for .kfx) still does not support the newer CSS sub-properties of font-variant, which would be required for ligature control.

I did not find anything about how to manually create custom Themes, which could also be used to set up ligation on the device level instead of on the book level.