Re: Ligatures

[Pip Cet]

On Mon, May 18, 2020 at 7:27 PM <address@hidden> wrote:
> > And this is where it gets back to "let's not hardcode the dependency
> > on Harfbuzz and FreeType, because other backends might actually give
> > us the information we need".
>
> But how should a backend guess where the subparts of a cluster are
> without the font providing it?

Well, of course it shouldn't. It should return the information that is
available, and then we can decide, based on a user setting, what we
want to do about it: the options are, at least, to treat the ligature
as atomic (the right thing to do for ligatures like %, &, and ß),
guess (possibly the right thing to do for ffi?), or refuse to use the
ligature in question and fall back to individual characters (which
isn't always possible, but it is what we do right now for ASCII
ligatures).

> And in the latter case, HarfBuzz
> does give us the info.

How so? I honestly don't think it does, because it would treat the
ligature as one glyph.