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Comment by bxparks | Hacker News Reader

Total tangent: What is the magic on that page that renders:

    if (putenv (var) != 0)

    if (putenv (var) ≠ 0)

on my browser (Firefox)?

When I try to copy that text, it copies as '!=' into my copypaste buffer.

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They're using a webfont with a ligature for !=.

Sheeet, I didn't even know that was possible. Why would they use that font for displaying C code? I looked at that ≠ and spent a few minutes trying to figure out what language it was. Maybe I should uncheck the "Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above" option in Firefox, though it woulld probably break other websites.

>Why would they use that font for displaying C code?

Using ligature fonts for programming became popular a few years ago. As in some people even use them in their editors.

Which is totally fine on their own machine, but using a webfont to force ligatures on anyone viewing their website is just confusing as a reader.

No, I get it. I don't use them either because I find them confusing. I'm just telling you you missed out on what was a quite popular trend from a few years ago.

Lately my Firefox has been showing a ligature for "fi" in monospace code blocks, showing those two characters in the width of a single character. On every website with code blocks. It is mildly infuriating and I don't understand it.

Right-click the ligature text -> Inpsect. In the Inspector, on the right there is a tab called "Fonts" (to the right of "Rules", "Layout", etc). That will show you what font(s) Firefox used to render all the text in the selected element.

I used Stylus to force ligatures off at some point, it mostly worked but caused some other issues.

FYI Fira Code is one example of a very popular programming font that supports ligatures (67k stars on GitHub) [1]. But totally get the frustration of seeing ligatures on the web and not understanding what was going on!

[1] https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode

> though it woulld probably break other websites.

It only breaks sites that are too poorly developed to respect the foundational principles of the web.

It breaks Google Calendar badly, almost unusable due to missing icons and spacing problems.

(Author here) I don't see that in Chrome so had no idea that was happening – thanks for pointing it out! I'm not a fan of coding ligatures so I just pushed a change to turn it off.

On Safari the 'notequal' is double-width, and you can select just half of it, which I didn't expect.

It's double wide on Firefox as well, and I could select half of it as well. I had to use a single "Unicode Character 'NOT EQUAL TO' (U+2260)" in my post on HN to describe what it looked like on my browser.

Those kinds of font ligatures are still separate characters.

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