Ubuntu

How to disable ligatures in Pango/Cairo?

Asked by Kimiko Koopman

A while ago now, letter combinations like s and t, f and i, have started to be rendered in a way that makes them look really weird. The s and t are joined into one character with a sort of bow from the top of the s to the t, and the f and i are put into the space of one character so the f overlaps the dot of the i. After some searching I've found that such things are called "ligatures" and they were used in the Middle Ages. I don't understand why they are appearing in this age again, but I would very much like to have them disappear again. I think it may be the part of Gnome called Pango or Cairo that is responsible for this, but have not been able to find a way to tell it to stop mangling those letters. Can you help me?

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John C Barstow (jbowtie) said : 		#1

Ligatures are in fact desirable for English, and absolutely required for most other languages (including Arabic and Indic). All professionally published materials use ligatures extensively in English and have done since the invention of the printing press.

If you are not a native English speaker this may be confusing at first but it is normal and expected behavior in most circumstances.

All that said, you can switch to a font that does not contain ligature definitions; monospaced fonts like Courier or wider sans serif fonts like Verdana do not typically contain ligatures.

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