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Comment by reificator | Hacker News Reader

I like to think I'm not too nitpicky about fonts, but that st ligature is incredibly distracting.

It's the second article I've seen here that uses it over the last few days, but I'm not sure if it's the same site or not.

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Thanks for the feedback. Do you have any font preference?

I have no problems with the current one apart from the s and t connecting like that.

Turning this clause off in your style sheet turns off that awful st ligature:

font-feature-settings: "liga", "dlig";

So just remove that clause from your stylesheet and you'll be rid of that ligature.

I like ligatures when they're used well, but that one is just incredibly distracting.

Shame the advice is to turn them off completely...

Testing a big more, just dropping "dlig" from the feature settings declaration turns off the awful st ligature. So they don't have to 'all' be turned off to get rid of that one. What I don't know is what other ones get turned off by dropping "dlig" from the declaration.

Please stick to a font already in my browser. My network is slow and webpages sometimes get stuck loading; the resources in your page took 40 seconds to load and your font didn't even load yet.

FWIW, this is what I'm seeing: https://imgur.com/a/pbR0SCH

Was hard to put my finger on it but now that you mention it it's definitely something with the letter/line spacing or the font itself.

In the modern age Latin script, the only acceptable ligature is "fi" in a proportional type, because the top curve of the F usually comes very close to the dot of the I already. For the rest, they're totally useless because we don't use moveable type anymore.

Well, I also tend to enjoy programming ligatures, such as != becoming ≠ or => becoming ⇒. (but in a size proportional to the pair of fixed width characters, see https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode )

But then I don't inflict them on anyone but myself and people who look over my shoulder...

That is why I disable custom fonts. Everything on the web is one of two fonts for me, sizes 9-14. I've been doing it for a decade and it makes websites so much better.

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