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Comment by BossingAround | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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