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Comment by wrs | Hacker News Reader

See also blogs where double hyphens in shell script examples have been automatically converted to em-dashes, and source code rendered in a monospaced font with monospaced ligatures like “ﬂ”. The latter not only fails copy/paste, it’s a typographical tragedy. Even Communications of the ACM does it, in a printed magazine with supposedly professional designers!

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Specifically ligatures in monospaced fonts is what finally prompted me to turn them off in my userChrome.css file.

I would be a little bit less repulsed by them if they took up the right amount of space, but they’d still be an abomination.

I've configured uBlock Origin to block remote fonts and aside from some icon fonts failing to load, it made my browser experience a lot better. Especially after picking a better monospace font for code blocks (IntelOne Mono in my case).

That's how you can see whether the writer uses a Mac or not.

Windows doesn't do that.

Mac also changes quotes, like

    let magic = "MAGIC";

    let magic = “MAGIC”;

It’s a function of the application, not the OS (though I see your point, the basic Mac text box does do it by default, unlike the Windows one (even in W11?)). MS Word will do the curly quote conversion on any OS. I’d guess it’s InDesign doing the ligatures in printed/PDF magazine articles, which would happen on any OS. Same is true with WordPress or a Markdown converter. There’s always an app preference somewhere to make this not happen, but people don’t bother finding it.

Windows itself won't, but have you ever tried copying code into a microsoft application and found that it didn't paste like it should and then fixed the escaping?

It will fuck the code up so bad that Ctrl+Z and starting over is your only option.

In MS Office, those mappings are a default that can be turned off.

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