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

[bugzilla at redhat.com]

Please do not reply directly to this email. All additional
comments should be made in the comments box of this bug.


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





--- Comment #19 from Kevin Kofler <kevin at tigcc.ticalc.org>  2008-11-10 04:47:38 EDT ---
> 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.

Sorry, I expressed myself badly. I know ligatures and similar constructs are
commonplace in some alphabets (Arabic and most of the Indic scripts, for
example).

So let me correct myself:
-> Why can't a Latin letter just be a letter? <-

To me all this ligature stuff for Latin letters looks like a solution looking
for a problem, i.e. "hey, we have all this complex text layout framework for
Arabic and Indic scripts, let's also use it for Latin just to be fancy".

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

Those are very good examples of the fi ligature gobbling up the dot on the i.

> 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.

They wouldn't have to do anything at all. My proposal is to disable ligatures
for Latin letters systemwide in Pango and Qt 4 Scribe, any ligatures provided
by fonts would just be ignored (as they were in the past, and still are in e.g.
Qt 3 apps).

As for the kerning, I know it's a separate issue, I only brought it up here
because it's part of the same philosophy of special-casing letter pairs. But
let's limit ourselves to ligatures in this bug report.

-- 
Configure bugmail: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/userprefs.cgi?tab=email
------- You are receiving this mail because: -------
You are on the CC list for the bug.