fi/fl ligature is on by default

[graphicore]

I'm just trying spacemono for programming and I like it so far.

However, the fl and fi ligatures are triggered in the liga feature, which is on by default. I have no way to control features in my coding editor.

I suggest moving these ligatures to the dlig feature, because for programming I don't want to have these ligatures to show up. The reason to use monospaced fonts in the first place is to be able to compare consecutive lines easily, char by char. E.g. I sometimes want to see if the lines have the same length. Lets say I'm writing a dictionary with keys that are all 4 chars long, think of OpenType feature tags like this:

{
     'liga': [//data]
   , 'dlig': [//data]
   , 'onum': [//data]
   , 'flac': [//data]
}

Putting fl in the liga feature causes confusion for me and removes an easy optical hint whether I got it right or not:

Something looks wrong, now I have to spend time to investigate.

[graphicore]

Here's another one, when writing a closing HTML tag, like </title>:

I get a south-west arrow.

[davelab6]

This was reported and closed in #3

I think it should probably be turned off by default as it comes up regularly

[davelab6]

I'm just trying spacemono for programming and I like it so far.

It is not intended for such use, btw

[davelab6]

ah! #2 addresses it

I think it should probably be turned off by default as it comes up regularly.

Not sure when the next release will be... @graphicore would you like to prep one?

[graphicore]

It is not intended for such use, btw

Aha, ok, I could stop using it for programming, I like it though :-)

@graphicore would you like to prep one?

I'll have a look.

[davelab6]

Maybe move more ligatures, this one one was suprising

[alanhogan]

I checked out https://www.zkcrush.xyz/ recently after it showed up on Hacker News and noticed a bizarre ligature there in the phrase "first and last". It stuck out like a sore thumb in the monospaced font.

I figured this was an error on the part of the website creator somehow, but looking into it, it is a bug in the font. This is trivially seen in the official Google Fonts specimen page.

I don’t know much about font encoding but while I strongly support the inclusion of these symbols for displaying the relevant Unicode codepoints, the ligation feature should not be enabled by default for a monospaced font. So, +1 to the issue

Note: Currently this is happening for Chromium browsers but not Safari

[com4]

Super hacky because I don't know anything about building fonts, but I used ToxicFrog's Ligaturizer repo to make a build: because the instructions in this repo are broken due to some glyph mismatch.

Comment out all ligatures in ligatures.py (unless you want them...) apply #2 (curl https://patch-diff.githubusercontent.com/raw/googlefonts/spacemono/pull/2.diff | patch -p1) to the spacemono submodule then follow the build instructions or if you prefer, here is my poor man's build: SpaceMonoFixedLigatures.zip

This is good enough for me but hopefully someone who knows what they're doing will fork this repo, apply the patch, and give us better builds.