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Comment by buckminster | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a fan of symbol ligatures but what I really loathe are monospaced fonts with a single character width fi ligature so the f and the i are both half width. I've seen several websites recently using fonts that do this. It is very visually distracting, especially in code samples.

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Really? So it's not monospaced? I'm having trouble imagining any monospaced font doing this.

(The ligatures in fonts such as Fira Code take up the same amount of space as the non-ligatured versions.)

I can't imagine why anyone would do this either. I suppose one possibility is that some software in their web stack is converting fi to an explicit ﬁ ligature and the monospaced font chosen by the web page doesn't support it so the browser does a substitution. When I spot another one I'll have to dig more deeply.

On Macs, Courier (but not Courier New) can do it, though not by default.

(Open up TextEdit, enable Rich Text, select Courier, type "ff", highlight it, go to Font > Ligatures > Use All. The "ff" will now take up the width of a single character.)

I've run into a bug where certain styles of Courier Prime turns into ligatures in Google Docs. (Long story short, whether or not ligatures get enabled is a complex interplay between the OS, font, browser, and application, and not every layer always does it right.)

I'm not really sure why font designers even bother creating them in monospace in the first place though, I can't imagine any valid use for them. The only thing I can imagine is if a badly written application forces a ligature character, at least the end result will be readable rather than an empty box or something.

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