cormullion
commented
1 year ago Hi! Thanks for the kind words!
I do have mixed thoughts about ‘ligatures’ :) -- see this -- although to be honest I don't think I have very strong reasons for either including them or not including them, other than noticing how much extra work is involved when a font designer enthusiastically adopts ligatures. Eg see FiraCode, where a lot of development effort is dedicated to them.
I think there are some interesting arguments for and against each of the character pairs/sets being replaced by a new ligature.
For example, perhaps != should be replaced by Unicode ≠ rather than by a synthetic two-character version - although obviously some languages won't support that character. But the two character version is probably a more legible design than the single character, so it might be a good addition.
With the triple equals, there are two problems (in my view of course :)). One is that a better, more compact, and less clumsy replacement is the mathematical operator U+2261 ≡, the second is that, if you're typing === it's important to see how many equals signs you've typed, so the gaps between them are important. So I don't think the 3-char version is much of an improvement, and the joining of the lines doesn't help.
Similarly I don't see why two plus signs (++) should be merged together to form some new 'gate'-like character. Or why www is worth turning into a saw-tooth wave character.
So my thoughts are that I think the best use for this OpenType feature is to replace an ugly combination with a better looking one. So far, that's mainly been arrows made out of angle brackets... :)
stale[bot]
Hi there!
Firstly, thank you so much for all your work on Julia Mono... This is a beautiful font! ❤️🔥
Anyway, I'm curious about ligatures / stylistic set support for
!=,===, and similar?Some of those even look fine in the text area there, but are more noticeable in wezterm when the ligatures / stylistic sets render a bit thicker...
What are your thoughts? ❤️