Comment by tomxor
3 years ago
> you might as well say: why are we even kerning fonts [...] is paramount to micro-typographic balance [...] is visually perceived as an interruption [...] won't preserve optical balance
These are typesetters concerns, not writers concerns. They are all context sensitive tweaks to what amounts to the same glyph.
If the rules for each have as well defined contexts as the article suggests, then it sounds like something more suited to ligatures and kerning.
Full glyph replacement ligatures were not something initially supported by all font formats, so perhaps the fact that they continuing to exist as separate characters is more of a historical detail. It's something that could easily be added with new fonts though.
Ligatures typically change the appearance of a character, they do not change the meaning. Merging the hyphen en the n-dash into the same character and then derive the correct one from the context (spaces around it) would be a whole new use of "ligatures".
From a software "separating of concerns" viewpoint it feels wrong to me to have your font renderer infer meaning. A pre-processor that replaces hyphens with the correct dash – like Word does – feels more sane to me.
> Ligatures typically change the appearance of a character, they do not change the meaning
Anyone can use a hyphen for all three purposes right now and people would understand the meaning, because the meaning is primarily derived from the context of surrounding glyphs. Only typesetters would complain that a subtly more appropriate glyph should be used for the purposes of refined optics and geometry etc.
Therefore an endash and emdash ligature could only change the meaning IF the context of each use case overlap. i.e if there is a valid glyph based context in which endash and emdash are both valid... which I don't think there is because that would be far too subtle.
Some fonts—like Inter—do this, but I see people complain that the font isn’t rendering exactly what they typed.
My favorite is that it will render 1920x1080, for example, as 1920×1080. I think the former looks terrible and unprofessional, especially when I see it in actual products rather than prose. So I really hope this catches on.