Subject: Re: bug#36914: Font Ligatures

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 04 Aug 2019 05:45:10 +0300

> Date: Sat, 03 Aug 2019 20:34:14 +0000
> From: Charles Jackson <[email-masked]>
> 
> I am requesting that GNU Emacs supports ligatures out of the box. I know
> about pretty-symbols-mode, and it is great, but it is not font
> ligatures.
> 
> Take my case for example: I just found the a new (new to me) font called
> Monoid (https://larsenwork.com/monoid/). It provides ligatures for
> various programming symbols That I would like to use. The ligatures are
> provided as actual True Type Font ligatures rather than Unicode symbols
> used by pretty-symbols-mode. Thus I couldn't use them at all. I even
> tried to look at the source code for the font to find the character
> code, but the codes for the ligature glyphs were not correct or did not
> exist.
> 
> I am asking you to provide font ligatures out of the box (emacs -Q) by
> using whatever fancy system that True Type Fonts use. This has become a
> feature that most text editors and word processors have by
> default. Emacs has no excuse.

Please be more specific about the feature you'd like to see: how would
Emacs support the ligatures? should it, for example, automatically
produce ﬀ when you type "ff" and ﬃ when you type "ffi"?  Or do you
want the ligation to happen only on-demand?

IOW, we need a user-level specification to make this happen.  Because
the infrastructure for supporting ligatures already exist, since we
started supporting the HarfBuzz shaping engine in Emacs.

Thanks.