Comment by snvzz

I don’t think this is really bloat.

Opentype supported ligatures in ‘96. Postscript Type 1 and even Knuth’s TeX supported ligatures to a certain extent.

It’s a pretty standard base-level feature for any sort of typesetting.

Imo this is akin to making a terminal animation by outputting blocks of ascii art. It’s not that terminals added video playback support— which would be bloat—but instead someone pushed a standard feature to a novel extent.

The goal is to print with a computer something like a late 15th century humanist document, a tradition of typography 500 years old, and not to print on a 200x320 screen, which had a tradition of merely a decade.

The early computer age of the 80s and 90s was merely playing catch-up to established standards. The standards of the 80s and 90s are not what we wanted to achieve ultimately.

Same with cinema: We shot on 4K-equivalent film for the past 100 years, only in the 80s and 90s with the computerization and videotapes we had a temporary standard of 480i, which we have overcome with sheer computer power, and we’re back to where we actually wanted to be in the beginning.