[Bug 368561] ligature-related font rendering bug with 'ff' and 'fi'

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https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=368561


Nicolas Mailhot <nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net> changed:

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--- Comment #18 from Nicolas Mailhot <nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net>  2008-11-10 03:52:42 EDT ---
(In reply to comment #17)
> Yet:
> * Qt/KDE 3 never used those ligatures, nobody ever complained about that.

People did, you just didn't notice it

> * I remember reading about complaints from users of languages with dotless i
> (mainly Turkish) about the fi and ffi ligatures which hide the dot on the i in
> several fonts.

If the fonts are buggy they should be fixed. If the fonts are ok but freetype
makes a mess of them freetype should be fixed

> * Why can't a letter just be a letter?

That's a naïve western view. An awful lot of "letters" in unicode and opentype
are not just "letters" but are rendered via various magic of which ligatures
are a very small part. The OO.o issue tracker is choke-full of people begging
SUN to support this kind of magic (because OO.o right now is even less capable
than QT3 was and QT4/pango would be if we followed your suggestion). So users
do care about this. (and the OO.o people are working to fix their bugs)

DejaVu ligatures are light and not as spectacular than in other fonts. But
DejaVu is not the only ligature user. Libertine has them, and so have an
increasing number of other fonts (any self-respecting font designer adds them
nowadays, because they're one of the key differentiator with legacy fonts)

http://www.josbuivenga.demon.nl/tallys.html

This is just a freetype autohinter bug. We can't ask font designers to ignore
the patented bytecode engine and at the same time not support stuff that work
with it. We can't hide your head in the sand while font technology progresses
and Microsoft/Adobe invest massively in OpenType to fix its remaining
typographical problems. We can't refuse to support stuff that works in other
OSes and hope users don't notice.

> (It's not just ligatures, kerning for
> letter pairs like To where the o gets moved into the empty space of the T is
> similarly funky.)

This is overtight kerning in the font of which upstream is aware of (and on the
TODO fix list). Not ligatures at all.

> All those special cases make the fonts look irregular and
> inconsistent.

For the ligature bit, complain at freetype
For the kerning bit, complain at dejavu

That's two different problems. Modern fonts are complex beasts. We've
progressed a lot in past years but there's still a lot of work to do freetype
and free fonts side. Your proposal would not help things at all.

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