Hacker News Reader

Comment by escape_goat | Hacker News Reader

It's not joining it in a kerning sense, that's just the remarkably serif nature of EB Garamond, which has a little teardrop terminal on the tip of the 'c'. It's possible that you have font smoothing that is tainting the gap, otherwise it's your eyes.

View on HN

I was curious about this as well, it looks as though he’s using a specific font which creates a ligature between those letters. I think it’s specific because it’s only on the CT and it’s on other pages in his site. I went further to investigate what this might be and it’s a little used print style: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/591499/what-is-t...

No, the heading font is Lato, not Garamond, and it's definitely some kind of digraph that only shows up with the combination "ct". Compare the letter "c" in these two headings: https://i.imgur.com/Zq53gTd.png

This should be upvoted. Thank you, I hadn't realized that OP was referring to the heading font or scrolled down to see what is yes, quite a remarkable ligature. It appears to be Lato delivered from <https://brick.freetls.fastly.net/fonts/lato/700.woff> The ligature appears due to discretionary ligatures being turned on.

     h1, h2, h3 {
     font-feature-settings: "kern" 1, "liga" 1, "pnum" 1, "tnum" 0, "onum" 1, "lnum" 0, "dlig" 1;
      font-variant-ligatures: discretionary-ligatures;
     }

Actually, EB Garamond has c_t and s_t ligatures.

and a very subtle f_f. I don't find those nice though.

It does, but those would only be applied if the `font-variant-ligatures: historical-ligatures` property were specified, so they don't appear on this site.

I inspected for a ligature and any evidence of CSS kerning being turned on before commenting, but I didn't test it to see what the page looked like with it turned on, so I didn't have active knowledge of the possibility of a ligature. If I'd know, it would have been better to give wider scope to the possibility that somehow kerning was being activated by OP's browser. I should have known better than to make a remark about a font without absolutely scrupulous precision! I actually appreciate the comments and corrections.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com