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Comment by dfc | Hacker News Reader

Thanks. I think I might have to rethink my choice of default fonts. It seems that Iceweasel uses all available ligatures. I have to use fontspec to explicitly turn on the rare/obscure ligatures in latex. Hopefully Mozilla will give a little thought to enabling all ligatures by default.

Examples: https://imgur.com/a/7Fcdm

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I think you misunderstand. By default, Gecko enables just the common ligatures. But this page has the following styles:

  div {
    text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;
    font-variant-ligatures: common-ligatures;
    -webkit-font-variant-ligatures: common-ligatures;
    -moz-font-feature-settings: "liga", "dlig";
    -ms-font-feature-settings: "liga", "dlig";
    -webkit-font-feature-settings: "liga", "dlig";
    -o-font-feature-settings: "liga", "dlig";
    font-feature-settings: "liga", "dlig";
  }

The text-rendering style enabled optional ligatures. The font-variant-ligatures style enables the use of OpenType "liga" and "clig" ligatures, but then the font-feature-settings style overrides that with "liga" and "dlig" (discretionary ligatures). What that means depends on how your font designer flagged their various ligatures, of course, but the page is explicitly opting into more than just common ligatures.

I may have been overzealous here. The page also provides Garamond in various OpenType and webfont styles, and I wanted to be sure that the Garamond is displayed with ligatures, because Garamond's ligatures are really nice and not particularly noticeable (whereas I notice the lack of ligatures right away). I didn't really give thought to what happens if the page is being rendered in a different OpenType font for some reason. Perhaps I should replace "dlig" with "clig".

I am not sure why you think you should just replace dlig with clig? Did you want the discretionary ligatures? Which of the contextual ligatures do you want? In my opinion it is the discretionary and the historic ligatures that are distracting and gaudy. I you can not think of the specific ligatures you want from the discretionary/contextual/historic why not just stick with the basics provided in liga?

This is going to sound crazy: Does anyone know the name of the js/css development website that has three or four panes and lets you mock up things on screen. There is probably more than one. I can not think of the name right now for the life of me. I always see it linked to when people are doing demonstrations here on HN.

I put up an image here of your defaults with your fonts and mine:

https://imgur.com/a/x44Wq

My default font is Minion Pro and you can see the extra discretionaries in words like "spurred, directed, testing, etc." The one goofy css test that I found did not let me choose any web fonts so I could not check your garamond but I did check my local Garamond Pro. and all of the same discretionary ligatures are present in my local garamond.

Nice,

I've been doing some genealogy research recently (caution: if you are obsessive this can become a real time suck), some of this has involved reading old German and Austrian newspapers, A typical obituary page might have Swiss, Roman and Gothic (black letter) faces, in particular the gothic tends to make extensive use of ligatures

> genealogy research recently (caution: if you are obsessive this can become a real time suck

I experienced this first hand as a child - more summer vacations than I'd have cared for involved trips arranged so we'd pass by various cemetery's or churches so my dad could check graves or church books against his latest leads...

I had a problem displaying the page in Chrome Beta on Android. Most of the page was blurry and I couldn't read past two or three screens of the article, it just turned into a scrolling black field. Haven't seen that before...

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