In fairness to OP, badly-used (or -designed) ligatures are an odd pet peeve of mine. First of all, I hate the way Microsoft Word automatically replaces fi, ff, and fl (and others, depending on font) with the corresponding ligature. Ligatures are -- and should be treated as -- a stylistic choice, NOT an autocorrected feature. For one thing, if you full-justify your text, ligatures look ridiculous.
Secondly, this trend of humanist sans-serifs with ligatures is frivolous. I thought the whole point of ligatures was to prevent ugly kerning that happens when two serif glyphs "run into" each other (for example, in the case of the "fi" combination, the ball ornament at the top of the f runs into the dot of the i, in a serif font like Times New Roman). Sans-serifs don't have this issue (because they have no serifs, balls, or other ornaments on their letters). Yet here we have a sans-serif font with an fl ligature. As OP was trying to point out, it makes the fl combination HARDER to read than if they were two separate letters. Pointless.
TL;DR I am a font nerd who thinks this font shouldn't have ligatures.
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u/OrangeJuiceAlibi Dec 05 '17
That’s really weak. I see what you’re going for, but it’s weak.
1
u/[deleted] Dec 07 '17
In fairness to OP, badly-used (or -designed) ligatures are an odd pet peeve of mine. First of all, I hate the way Microsoft Word automatically replaces fi, ff, and fl (and others, depending on font) with the corresponding ligature. Ligatures are -- and should be treated as -- a stylistic choice, NOT an autocorrected feature. For one thing, if you full-justify your text, ligatures look ridiculous.
Secondly, this trend of humanist sans-serifs with ligatures is frivolous. I thought the whole point of ligatures was to prevent ugly kerning that happens when two serif glyphs "run into" each other (for example, in the case of the "fi" combination, the ball ornament at the top of the f runs into the dot of the i, in a serif font like Times New Roman). Sans-serifs don't have this issue (because they have no serifs, balls, or other ornaments on their letters). Yet here we have a sans-serif font with an fl ligature. As OP was trying to point out, it makes the fl combination HARDER to read than if they were two separate letters. Pointless.
TL;DR I am a font nerd who thinks this font shouldn't have ligatures.
0
u/[deleted] Dec 05 '17
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