Advanced text features and PDF | Hacker News Reader

Advanced text features and PDF

nibblestew.blogspot.com

67 pointsingve9 comments

Do people actually like ligatures? I tried it with the IntelliJ font and I could just not get used to it. Maybe because I'm slightly dyslexic, but boy, it almost felt like the code I was reading was in a different language.

Ligatures might look beautiful, but my brain just says "nope, I don't know this symbol" and refuses to process it in a meaningful way.

Perhaps any amount of ligatures is too much for some to read easily, but I appreciate it when they fix collisions.

https://practicaltypography.com/ligatures.html

I have

  font-variant-ligatures: none !important;
  font-feature-settings: "liga" off !important;

in my userContent.css, so I had to stare at the three examples for too long because the second and third looked identical to me. After disabling the rules, I can see what they're going for.

I have those rules in my userContent.css because I get livid when I see ligatures in a fixed-width font (often, but not always, code blocks) where for instance the 'fi' ligature takes up one horizontal space. I don't know enough about css, maybe there is a way to specify that I want to disable them only in contexts where the font is fixed-width?

edit: [0] seems to say that this is not possible with plain CSS / userContent.css

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/a/77367843

Ligatures in code are a very special case as they intentionally show entirely different glyphs. Typically ligatures are used in typography to make the text feel more natural by avoiding pathological combinations of glyphs that look awkward and distracting without it.

I love the ones I don't even notice.

Ligatures in fixed-width fonts are almost always an aberration, on the other hand.

> Unfortunately the way things are set up means that you can only specify horizontal kerning when laying out horizontal text and vertical kerning for vertical text. If your script requires both, you are not going to have a good time.

The Ts operator (sets text rise, ie changes the baseline) could be useful here. Text selection in PDF readers may even treat text with different text rise as being on the same line.

> We could specify kerning manually with a custom translation matrix that translates the rendering location by the amount needed. There are two main downsides to this. First of all it would mean that instead of having a stream of glyphs to render, you'd need to define 9 floating point numbers (actually 6 due to reasons) between every pair of glyphs.

Or use Td... 2 numbers.

congrats on the journey into print technology! as others have said, ligatures divide the audience into "no extras please, I want clear character codes for my tech work" and "produce visually pleasing type content for my excellent reading audiences"

Digital information is relatively new compared to print.. which is relatively new compared to human history. So there is some overlap in communication, language, style and accuracy challenges. Print is not dead! but not the focus so much on an online forum.

PDF the document definition is sort of a mess really, but here it is. Obviously Adobe Systems is not going to save everyone. great to see this writeup here today.

PDF was originally designed for printers, wasn't it? So making it accessible to screen readers is tricky.

Not "for printers" per se. What it was designed for was to accurately represent a printed page in electronic form. So the innards of a PDF look more like "instructions" for a virtual printer telling it where to position "font glyphs" on a "virtual sheet of paper".

It's use as an almost universal "printer format" for applying toner/ink to paper came much later.

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