[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 #20 from Nicolas Mailhot <nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net>  2008-11-10 06:09:42 EDT ---
(In reply to comment #19)
> > 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? <-

Because even latin scripts have exceptions that need magic (you wouldn't
believe what the africans do with latin letters).

> 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.

Which is ok for non-turkish users ie turkish needs a special locl rule for
ligatures in fonts or even some special magic at pango/harfbuzz level.

> > 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).

Experience shows this won't lead to any fix freetype-side and we'll just have
to enable ligature support under user pressure in a few months, with the bug
still unfixed. (hiding ligature problems was already tried firefox-side with no
good result)

Sorry but ligatures exist and ignoring them in the hope our bugs will magically
go away is not a solution. Please spend your energy getting freetype people to
fix their stuff.

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