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Comment by ascorbic | Hacker News Reader

As with all letter spacing, the size is determined by the font metrics. There doesn't need to be a special character for it.

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Even assuming the goal is to get something like the below?

Mr.^Smith^turned^off^the^lights.^^Then^he^went^to^sleep.

Not the person you asked, but I think so. Some fonts also convert “fi” into a character where the letter-spacing is very small and the i loses its point, so there’s definitely a mechanism for letter combination / adaptive spacing.

Converting "fi" into "ﬁ" only requires a lookup table, though fonts can do some pretty fancy things: https://developer.apple.com/fonts/TrueType-Reference-Manual/...

Knowing that "Mr. Smith." is intra-sentence but "Me. Smith." is inter-sentence is well beyond what fonts can do, however.

I thought the rule was that ligatures shouldn't cross syllable boundaries. Like the fi in "fine" can be replaced but not the fi in "barfing", so it would need to be a bit more than a lookup table. Or maybe a dictionary-sized lookup table isn't a problem anymore.

I see https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/50660/when-shoul... suggesting this, but I don't believe any fonts implement this.

Are fonts Turing-complete now? I have a feeling they'll become such if not already there; a little programs, complete with configuration switches so that you can control if and how a combination of characters get converted into a ligature depending on surrounding context.

TrueType font hinting actually is Turing complete. A font may contain programs that run on a VM that has functions, variables, unbounded loops, etc.

There needs to be a character because a sentence is a grammatical concept not a lexical concept.

Mr. Bean is in one sentence, not two.

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