Google Logo Ligature Bug

I thought there was something wrong with this blog post that kept writing "googlelogoligature" but no some absolute cretin really added that as a ligature to the font.

sublinear• 1 year ago

Fonts can include "ligatures", which let font designers special-case specific combinations of letters ... but the feature has been (ab)used for many other things

Same reason to not use ligatures in your IDE, terminal, etc.

Did that trend finally die off?

nine_k• 1 year ago

Ligatures that give slightly stylized rendering to stuff like <!-- or even replace a >= with a ≥ in your source code view are much less prone to exploitation than a "ligature" that replaces a 18-letter sequence with the word "Google" in your browser's address bar. It's like comparing the hazardousness levels of a safety pin and of a chainsaw.

jasonthorsness4• 1 year ago

My great fear is they will become so popular that the option to disable them will be forgotten. I can’t stand the ligatures that noticeably change and merge the glyphs.

wbl• 1 year ago

Have you ever read a book typeset without them? Imagine a dot in fig where the loop of the f conflicts.

kstrauser2• 1 year ago

Fortunately, no. They’re increasingly well supported for the user base who think they look nice… like me.

I love the way my code looks in Berkeley Mono on any modern editor version. Seeing `>=` render similar to `≥` makes me smile. It’s a tiny visual tweak that doesn’t even cause anything to move on the screen, because that font’s ligatures are the same width as the characters they replace. I see no downside to it for me.

layer84• 1 year ago

Personally, I find an extra-wide “≥” more ugly and jarring than “>=“. If anything, I would prefer programming languages to understand the actual Unicode “≥”, and people learning how type that (Compose key, dedicated IDE support, or whatever). It would be nice for more people to appreciate that the characters one can type aren’t limited to the symbols printed on the keyboard.

immibis2• 1 year ago

Ligatures should not be used in monospaced fonts, for obvious reasons.

jefftk• 1 year ago

I would be ok with the equivalent of the "fi" ligature, where two letters would be drawn slightly differently when next to each other.

Hasnep• 1 year ago

If the ligature takes up the same horizontal space as the characters it represents, then I don't see why not.

underrun• 1 year ago

hard disagree. i use monospace fonts with ligatures for programming. primarily i get things like -> rendered as a full arrow or == connected or ... as an actual ellipsis. it's subtle but it's nice.

I've also seen nice use of ligature for markdown formatting.

the idea that ligatures shouldn't be used with monospace fonts would also break monospace in multiple languages as some languages require ligatures to display single characters correctly.

sjs382• 1 year ago

There are many others including "glogoligature".

jasonthorsness4• 1 year ago

It’s difficult (impossible?) to force a font on the web in a way that can’t be overridden by some users. This must have been a font designed for device-specific applications picked up for other use-cases? Or maybe they just didn’t care that the long tail of users might see the string “googlelogoligature” instead of the logo.

em-bee5• 1 year ago

any website that supplies its own fonts will work. the number of people that would override the fonts specified in a website is small.

void-pointer• 1 year ago

Why didn’t google just use a Unicode private use code point like apple does with U+F8FF? ()

layer84• 1 year ago

Because that wouldn’t degrade gracefully with a different font.

odo1242• 1 year ago

I mean, “googlelogoligature” degrades just as gracefully as “undefined”, I would say

(Which is to say that it doesn’t)

anal_reactor2• 1 year ago

The linked article on Unicode is far more interesting actually. I never really cared to think before how Unicode works, but reading the submission letter of beet emoji was the most interesting thing I've read this month so far.

Google Logo Ligature Bug

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