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Comment by laserbeam | Hacker News Reader

I know this is not constructive and I'm sorry, but I just can't read the text with those st and ct ligatures. It makes me feel like the author is trolling with them and I shouldn't take the text seriously. I know that's an exaggeration but that's what the design makes me feel.

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Agreed, I don't understand why anyone would use ligatures like that on body text. Add them to titles you want to look particularly fancy if you must but please don't mess with the readability of anything longer than a paragraph.

But why to draw hairs between all 'ct' and 'st'? As a non-native speaker, is that some English weirdness that I have yet to learn about?

It's how English was written in the "olden times". At that time, little flairs (such as ligatures) were pretty common, and were very fanciful. Some simpler ligatures (like ff) survive today, but embellished ones (like ct) were toned down. It's just a stylistic choice to draw them one way or another, but it's jarring to see the fancier ones in "modern" texts because we're used to the simpler styles.

Fun fact: The German "eszsett" (ß; U+00DF) is a ligature for "ss" (specifically the "long s"[0] and a normal "s") that evolved over time to be one "letter".[1]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sz_modern.svg

To me it just feels out of place, like a calligraphy ligature got accidentally mixed with a standard serif font. From what I've seen this kind of ligature is usually applied to many other letter combinations as well, in which case it at least looks consistent.

The same goes for the ampersand – “et” slowly morphed into “&”.

> It's how English was written in the "olden times".

Exactly.

(skipping some minor details)

When we started printing instead of writing, we dumbed the letterset down into fewer mechanical pieces. Thus earlier printers in English had to use the letter 'f' for the discarded "long 's'" letter, back when the long 's' was still expected by readers.

And that dumbed-down letterset was the one that then made it to typewriters and then our keyboard today.

According to the Wikipedia page for eszett [0] it evolved from "sz", as the name "eszett" suggests. (I only realized the link with "z" when I saw "tz" ligatures on street signs in Berlin.) Given that its typographic origin is sz, and given that its name literally says sz, I wish the spelling reformists had gone for sz rather than ss!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9F

It's one way it was written, I bet. If my experience from old Norwegian church books is any indication, there were a lot of ligature fads. Some liked to replace all double consonants with a single consonant with a line over, for instance. It had a good couple of decades.

Do we really need to continue this stuff on computer screens.

Ligatures are old fashioned in English but still very common in French. Some ligatures are actually mandatory (like the oe in cœur, heart) while others like st are pretty common in proper typefaces such as those used for novels. The author is probably French (Aurélien).

They also space out question marks, exclamation marks and colons, which is standard in French but not in English.

I've been writing almost exclusively in cursive for my entire life past age 8 and that font looks crazy to me. I learned both D'Nealian and Zaner-Bloser in different schools and have seen a lot of my grandmother's writing, which was semi-Spenserian.

The stroke just doesn't go in the right direction for those ligatures. My guess is that this font is based on a French (or maybe other latin) script.

These ligatures are definitely French ligatures. See for example this picture from French wikipedia,

https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ligature_typograph...

But also French typographical ligatures (well beyond the syntactic ones that are mandatory) aren't really related to cursives, they are a typographical convention. like the cursive s doesn't look like s and wouldn't have a ligature with t from the top of the t in cursive. (However, at least for French cursives it's common to do a single cross for double tt which I guess is a ligature?)

I also only learned cursives in school. In fact writing in script was forbidden and not taught at all.

Perhaps the website was designed for a french audience, and an alternate theme not created for the english localisation of this article...

I also found it distracting, which is a shame, because the actual core of the argument the author is making is an important one.

Yeah, that got on my nerves too. Ligatures (like kerning) are supposed to help make reading more fluent and otherwise blend in, not stand out like a sore thumb. Really not sure what those ligatures are supposed to say - "wow, look how cool this font is, it has ligatures!!!"?!

At first I thought I had an unusual amount of very small hair on my display.

Very small, curly hairs... hmm. (I might have thought the same thing while reading this on the toilet... so you can imagine the extra layer of credibility that afforded.)

I wiped my phone screen a few times until I accepted it is part of the text. Is that a toggle in the text editor? And if it is then should reader clients have a counter toggle for it? I'm thinking autocrlf style.

Luckily Reader Mode or disabling CSS takes care of the oddity.

I wonder if that would ﬆill work if the ligature were done in Unicode instead of CSS?

Interesting question! The st and ct ligatures used in the article don't seem to be part of the precomposed Latin ligature set, and what is there strikes me as far less obnoxious [1,2]. I expect it's possible to hack something together with combining characters, but also that the visual result would be far too ugly for the tastes of anyone who was desiring ligatures in the first place.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligature_(writing)#Ligatures_i...

[2] https://superuser.com/questions/669130/double-latin-letters-...

U+FB06 (LATIN SMALL LIGATURE ST) does display the same as the obnoxious ligature in the article if you have the right font. I actually used that for the "st" in the word "still" in my comment above.

In the HN comment editor it is the same as in the article, with that stupid curve connecting the s and t.

In the rendered comment in Chrome, Firefox, and Safari on my Mac it is using for regular comment text some font where the s and t are joined much less obtrusively. In fact at first I thought HN was replacing the U+FB06 on output with separate s and t. E.g., these two look very similar for me: ﬆill still.

For rendered code blocks on Safari and Chrome it is using the font that has the curve. On Firefox it does not have the curves. Here is a code block example:

  ﬆill
  still

I was going to suggest blocking web fonts with uBlock Origin, but I get them even with JS and fonts blocked.

Turns out a CSS rule does this:

    font-variant-ligatures: common-ligatures discretionary-ligatures contextual historical-ligatures;

I didn't really understand what everyone was talking about since I use a combination of uMatrix and noscript and noscript blocks webfonts by default. But, after whitelisting his site, eh, it didn't bother me. I guess it's what one is used to.

It does really mess up the typography

> I'm sorry, but I just can't read the text with those st and ct ligatures.

The whole font is bad. It looks pixilated and blurry, which can only be explained by that being the intended look. It's bizarre.

HN, where text looking bad on your machine means the designer intended for it to be unreadable. Isn't that more bizarre?

It doesn't look pixelated on my machine, it looks pretty nice - here's a screenshot at 200% zoom:

https://i.imgur.com/WE1tbIB.png

The ligatures are definitely an unusual artistic choice...seems like the sort of thing you'd finally get used to 4 chapters into a book, but until you're immersed in it, it's quote distracting.

The font looks much less ill-defined and irregular if I tell the browser to enlarge the text to 130%. There are still some issues at that size.

But I'm not going to judge it by how it looks after I do a manual adjustment. The way it's presented is terrible. It somehow manages not to fit into the pixel grid of my 15-inch 3840x2160 screen. These are not large pixels!

It's like that tiktok voice when used in technical demos. Just can't focus on anything else.

Somehow these ligatures trigger subvocalization in my brain, with the silent "author's voice" speaking with a lisp. Probably not what was intended.

I assumed they were intentional for editorial effect: deliberately designed to disrupt the flow of a reader attempting to follow the text, in the same way that he claims the compression artefacts disrupt the perception of a skilled photographer trying to use the heavily compressed webp and jpeg images.

I couldn't read it because it was a tiny column of text at a tiny font size with the rest of the screen being wasted space. Thank goodness for reader view.

I even went so far as to check the html code of the page to find out what was going on there. It is annoying, almost snobbish.

This site made me add my first-ever global Stylus sheet:

* { font-variant-ligatures:unset!important; }

I'm pretty infuriated that this is necessary, why would someone abuse readability so much for their own personal satisfaction about how "cool and unique" they are? Usability. Comes. First.

I wouldn't turn off all ligatures, some of them are actually useful.

It's their website. They can do with it whatever the hell they want with it. They owe random people on HN exactly nothing. And you can also do whatever the hell you want on your website, because that's your website.

You also need to reset "font-feature-settings" by the way.

and he can globally remove whatever he wants from being displayed in his browser with global style overrides!

what a glorious world we live in

They didn't just add a tip how to override it, they said this should not be done at all.

I read this comment. I thought, "wow typical HN, someone has taken the time to write this big blog post and the top comment is about some stupid little typographic detail."

Then I went to read the text and... :(

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