The "monospace" font has ligatures for some often occuring combinations,
including "st", "ff" and "fi", and these are crammed within 1 character
cell.  This not only looks ugly, making text hard to read, but also breaks
alignment, displacing everything after such a ligature by 1 position.
A ligature of width 2 might be acceptable.

The basic rule for a fixed-pitch font is for every character to have width
of its wcwidth() (1, 2 for CJK, 0 for combining/specials).  This font fails
this requirement.

Also, this is quite nasty because fonts-georgewilliams installs itself as
the default system monospaced font on machines where it's installed.

Hi Adam,

thanks for taking the time to report this.

Ideally would be great to have this fixed upstream, this is why I'm
cc-ing George Williams (hopefully using the right mail address...).
As you can see here [1] this font hasn't been touched since 2002, so
it's a bit of a shot in the dark, but I'm trying anyway
:).

This has been reported as #760826, which I'm going as well to forward
upstream as also in this case would be great to have the change made
directly there.


Cheers,
Francesca


[1]: http://fontforge.org/sfds/index.html

package fonts-georgewilliams
retitle 760966 fonts-georgewilliams: the “monospace” font has ligatures with multiple letters in a single cell
thanks

I confirm this behaviour causes the problems Adam describes.

A sample text for this purpose, to see the ligatures:

    flip split waffle, find stuffing

contains many character sequences that have been type-set as
single-cell ligatures. What should be fixed-width, one cell per
letter, is misaligned with some cells containing multiple ligatured
letters.

Yes, an example of a (proprietary) font with attractive 2-letter
ligatures occupying 2 cells is Siegfried Rückel's “FF Nuvo Mono”. If
the George Williams fixed-pitch fonts changed to have exactly one
letter in each cell even for the ligatures, that would IMO resolve
this bug.

Can you cite where that rule is expressed authoritatively from a
typographical perspective, so font makers can be directed to it for
purpose of standardisation?

If not an authoritative typographical reference, we could direct font
makers to a reference computer standard with some authority. Where
should we direct such queries?

I see numerous nominally fixed-pitch fonts that break that rule
<URL:https://dribbble.com/shots/1377467-Monospaced-ligatures>. Even
the “FF Nuvo Mono” cited as a good example above will, in some
sequences, use less than 1 cell per letter (e.g. the “ffi” ligature).

I agree this is a bug to be fixed, preferably upstream. But in
communication with font designers, we would do well to know what is
the authority – preferably in the typography field – for this
requirement.