Comment by speleding
3 years ago
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.