Disable ligatures for fixed-width fonts

[GoogleCodeExporter]

What steps will reproduce the problem?
1. Download Winter Wonderland from 
http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/winter.z5
2. Start the game in Gargoyle
3. Press ‘Enter’ a few times, to get to the first description.

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?
The second sentence of the room description says

    Light filters in through drab curtains

in a fixed-width font. The fi ligature looks really out of place. Ligatures 
don’t really work with fixed-width fonts, since two letters will be cramped 
into the space reserved for one. Therefore, ligatures should be disabled for 
fixed-width fonts. (For normal text fonts, ligatures are great, and should stay 
enabled.)

What version of the product are you using? On what operating system?
Latest SVN version (as of 2012-07-09).

Please provide any additional information below.
If you type ‘look’ as the first command, the room description is shown 
again, but now in a normal text (proportional) font, where the fi ligatures 
looks fine. I’m not sure if the original description being shown in a 
fixed-width font is a bug in the game or in Gargoyle.

Original issue reported on code.google.com by k...@huftis.org on 9 Jul 2012 at 6:47

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Ligatures are disabled for fixed-width fonts, but some versions Liberation Mono 
(and perhaps other monospaced fonts) incorrectly report themselves as 
proportional, which Gargoyle can do nothing about.  The included Liberation 
Mono version should be fixed (see 
http://www.intfiction.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=3134); it's possible you're 
not using the font that came with Gargoyle but instead an older system font.

Can you try switching fonts and see if the problem is fixed?

Original comment by cspiegel@gmail.com on 10 Jul 2012 at 8:37

[GoogleCodeExporter]

If I change the font in .garglkrc to ‘Courier New’, ligatures are correctly 
disabled. The version of Liberation Mono in Gargoyle is 1.07 (according to 
‘strings LiberationMono-Regular.ttf | fgrep Version’), while the version on 
my system is 1.06. But shouldn’t the version included in Gargoyle be 
automatically used (if not, what is the point of including it) instead of the 
system version?

Original comment by k...@huftis.org on 10 Jul 2012 at 8:46

[GoogleCodeExporter]

On the Unix side of things, fontconfig is used to load the fonts, so your 
system fonts will be found.

Ben will be able to answer for sure, but I presume the font files are included 
for the Windows installer, which installs fonts.  Packages for Unix-like 
systems are typically more flexible, so a Gargoyle port on, say, FreeBSD can 
simply say that it depends on a particular font port, whereas on Windows it's 
necessary to bundle all dependencies.

Original comment by cspiegel@gmail.com on 11 Jul 2012 at 3:38

[GoogleCodeExporter]

This had already been fixed in Gargoyle; for Unix systems, it's more of a 
vendor issue.  Improved documentation around fonts (and configuration in 
general) might be useful, however.

Original comment by cspiegel@gmail.com on 24 Jul 2012 at 3:33

• Changed state: Invalid