Ligatures and contextual alternatives

[flying-sheep]

love your font, but having tasted the beauty that is Fira Code’s ligatures, i can’t go back.

having both fantasque and those ligatures would be perfection!

the contextual alternatives are also amazing: having e.g. the * in *ptr and - in foo-bar adjusted based on the height of the characters next to them… yum!

[vviikk]

Please. Your font looks gorgeous :) Only thing stopping me is Ligatures.

[SethGunnells]

I cannot upvote this enough. This is my favorite font to use for all my monospace needs, but I'm using Fira Code right now because I love the ligatures. Having them in this font would be wonderful and I would be back immediately. I will even pay to see this happen!

[rebo]

Great font but ligatures are the future !

[belluzj]

I have started working on this. Here is my work-in-progress on the Regular. The yellow highlights indicate which ligatures have a special combined glyph in this font, compared to all the ligatures that are handled by Fira Code and Hasklig.

I have reused the same techniques as Fira Code, so the font should have the same behaviour while editing. Only the Regular weight has ligatures for now. You can grab a test copy here: https://github.com/belluzj/fantasque-sans/releases/tag/v1.8-alpha

To continue, I would need feedback on those points:

• Is the behaviour of the font indeed satisfactory while editing code with ligatures?
• Are the currently implemented ligatures correct? (especially the F# pipes and Haskell ones, because I have no knowledge of their semantics or intended use)
• Which other ligatures are really needed? (I feel that some of the ligatures from Fira Code such as <+> or <*> are not really needed here because my + and * are already big enough and almost centered vertically (OK not exactly).

When all is fine on the regular I will do the same for the bold and italic and release. Thanks in advance for your feedback.

[SethGunnells]

Thank you for working on this! I am so excited to see ligatures coming to my favorite font!

I am trying it right now in Atom, but am having no luck. Ligatures don't seem to be appearing anywhere.

Edit: I tried both OTF and TTF with no luck.

[belluzj]

Did you download the font from this page? https://github.com/belluzj/fantasque-sans/releases/tag/v1.8-alpha
Did you check in the regular weight (not bold, not italic)?

Thanks for trying it out :)

[SethGunnells]

Yes and yes.

[SethGunnells]

Tried it in TextEdit this time to confirm it wasn't Atom crapping out. Here's the results.

Edit: Not sure how to confirm I definitely have the right font. I did click the link and download the FantasqueSansMono-Normal.zip file. I am 90% sure I correctly replaced the current regular weight font with the new one.

[belluzj]

Can you drag and drop the TTF on that page: http://www.impallari.com/testing/

And check that ligatures work there?

[SethGunnells]

Nevermind! Turns out I was not replacing the font correctly. I needed to remove it completely from Font Book and add the new one for it to work properly. Here it is working!

Thank you for doing this! It looks amazing!

[belluzj]

ok great :)

[nikolalukovic]

Nice work on ligatures! When are you planning an official release?

[joewreschnig]

I'm very happy to see this going in. Two requests:

• Of the ligatures in Fira Code, I'd also like to see .= (to center the dot), /= (same as "not equal to" in some Lisp languages), and =~ (replace the top bar with a wavy line).

• Today I use a variant font, Fira Code Symbol, which doesn't use "real" ligature support but places the combined glyphs at PUA codepoints. Then I use editor support to map replacements on a per-language basis. So "===" appears as a ligature in JavaScript but not C, etc. As far as I know this is not possible with "real" ligatures, which are always global. Would it be possible to ship a variant of the font with ligatures disabled but still contains the glyphs in the PUA range? (For Fira Code Symbol, they begin at U+E100.)

[vviikk]

While we're waiting for full ligature support, (which looks awesome!) you can use https://github.com/lemeb/a-better-ligaturizer to add ligatures from another font. Works great.

[NOBLES5E]

This is awesome. It will be great if we also have emacs instructions https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode/wiki/Emacs-instructions

[DrBearhands]

I seem to be missing the ligature for /= in Elm (should be the same as the more popular != in other languages), which I did have with firacode, though that might be a configuration error on my part.

[pfgray]

Is it intentional that the ligatures show up in "normal" and not "italic"?

[theevangelista]

I think ligatures are only drawn to regular/normal, there is no other variant yet, thus you get only on regular formatting

I have started working on this. Here is my work-in-progress on the Regular.

[macdems]

I would love to have small x in hexagonal numbers: 0xff like 0×ff

[radiosilence]

Ok, these are looking amazing :)

[Bradcomp]

I just wanted to say that I have been using the ligatures for Javascript coding for the last few months. It looks great and I haven't run into any issues. Thank you for this amazing font.

One that I liked having from Blackfont is the ligature for //. It's certainly not critical, but it makes comments a bit easier to read by putting the slashes close together with a little space after them.

I totally know that's probably not one to prioritize over the other suggestions here though.

[belluzj]

Hello ligatures-lovers!

I just published a new version that adds a bunch of ligatures to all weights, including those contributed by @artem-ogre in #114 (with tweaks).

Please report any issues with the existing ligatures.

I know that I didn't implement all the requests from above, and if you find more ligatures that are missing, you can add them to this thread. However I don't think that I'll be adding any more of those myself, at least for the time being (meaning the next couple years probably).

[f2l2pe]

Can we have a version without ligatures? I can't disable them on Visual Studio , only Code has this option

[MaskRay]

A version without ligatures will be great. I was bring up a new computer today and downloaded a new version. The ligatures made me wonder if I typed something wrong.

[belluzj]

The new version only adds ligatures, so if you don't want them you can keep the old version for now. Next release I'll add packages without the ligatures.

[alexeyten]

Just for information. To disable ligature on Linux (since my terminal doesn't support them) I use following config adapted from Archlinux wiki

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
    <match target="font">
        <test name="family" compare="eq">
            <string>Fantasque Sans Mono</string>
        </test>
        <edit name="fontfeatures" mode="assign_replace">
            <string>calt off</string> <!-- disable ligatures -->
            <string>ss01</string> <!-- k without loop -->
        </edit>
    </match>
</fontconfig>

[flying-sheep]

Great stuff, thank you @belluzj! The latest release contains ligatures, so I’ll close this issue.

[dantezhu]

hi, please add a no-ligatures version~, thanks!

[dantezhu]

hi, please add a no-ligatures version~, thanks!