Hacker News Reader

Comment by aidenn0 | Hacker News Reader

The "t" or the "ct" ligature?

Wow I am reading it at 170% zoom, and in the fourth paragraph the word "distribution" which contains the "st" ligature is automatically cut and "hyphenated" between the "s" and the "t" letters. But the ligature remains : half the ligature at the end of one line, and the other half of that ligature at the beginning of the next line ! This looks wrong. CSS has probably missed an edge case here. Or is it the job of some "text renderer" in the browser ?

"st", also.

It's the "historical-ligatures" feature of used font, if you aren't in the reader mode already, F12 and

    document.body.insertAdjacentHTML('beforeend','<style>p { font-variant-ligatures: common-ligatures discretionary-ligatures contextual;}</style>')

should turn it off. (Was "too much" for me either.)

But besides this, I found typography of that article quite nice; interesting that there are thin spaces before "?" and "!" and wide spaces (not double spaces) after sentences - also "old school" (and often frowned upon). I guess some WP plugin does it, but I admit don't remember seeing seen this anywhere else recently. (And I like it.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com