[Pkg-fonts-bugs] Bug#382521: more ligature problems

[Dick Streefland]

On Friday 2006-08-11 19:17, Christian Perrier wrote:
| It was mentioned in
| http://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?func=detailitem&item_id=16253
| 
| However, the bug reporter there said "The ligatures ff, fi, fl, ffi,
| and ffl are also mandatory - this is okay for FreeSerif and FreeSans
| because it's standard modern typographical practice, but it should not
| be done in FreeMono too, because it breaks the monospace-ness to have
| ff and fi taking up only one cell (ffi and ffl don't seem to be in
| FreeMono yet, or it would be even worse)."
| 
| For that reason, I didn't change all "liga" to "dlig" in the 010 patch.
| 
| Is it your advice that "fi", "ff" and "ij" ligatures should *not* be
| mandatory? What is the common practice in Dutch typography for "ij",
| for instance?

I'm no expert in typography, so I don't know. And quite frankly, I don't
care too much, as long as the text is readable. Currently, these
ligatures are not displayed correctly in justified text, and in some
cases also in un-justified text. See for instance the last paragraph of:

http://www.xs4all.nl/allediensten/voip/

With the FreeSans font in Firefox, the ligatures ij, ff, and fi overlap
with other characters.

My patch is probably only a workaround, and the real problem may be
incorrect ligature definitions, or incorrect font handling code.
However, I prefer readable text without ligatures over unreadable text
with ligatures.

-- 
Dick Streefland