Paul Boddie's Free Software-related blog
Paul's activities and perspectives around Free Software
Firefox and Monospaced Fonts
This has been going on for years, but a recent upgrade brought it to my attention and it rather says everything about what is wrong with the way technology is supposedly improved. If you define a style for your Web pages using a monospaced font like Courier, Firefox still decides to convert letter pairs like “fi” and “fl” to ligatures. In other words, it squashes the two letters together into a single character.
Now, I suppose that it does this in such a way that the resulting ligature only occupies the space of a single character, thereby not introducing proportional spacing that would disrupt the alignment of characters across lines, but it does manage to disrupt the distribution of characters and potentially the correspondence of characters between lines. Worst of all, though, this enforced conversion is just ugly.
Here is what WordPress seems to format without suffering from this problem, by explicitly using the “monospace” font-style identifier:
long client_flush(file_t *file);
And here is what happens when Courier is chosen as the font:
long client_flush(file_t *file);
In case theming, browser behaviour, and other factors obscure the effect I am attempting to illustrate, here it is with the ligatures deliberately introduced:
long client_flush(file_t *file);
In fact, the automatic ligatures do remain as two distinct letters crammed into a single space whereas I had to go and find the actual ligatures in LibreOffice’s “special character” dialogue to paste into the example above. One might argue that by keeping the letters distinct, it preserves the original text so that it can be copied and pasted back into a suitable environment, like a program source file or an interactive prompt or shell. But still, when the effect being sought is not entirely obtained, why is anyone actually bothering to do this?
It seems to me that this is yet another example of “design” indoctrination courtesy of the products of companies like Apple and Adobe, combined with the aesthetics-is-everything mentality that values style over substance. How awful it is that someone may put the letter “f” next to the letter “i” or “l” without pulling them closer together and using stylish typographic constructs!
Naturally, someone may jump to the defence of the practice being described here, claiming that what is really happening is kerning, as if someone like me might not have heard of it. Unfortunately for them, I spent quite a bit of time in the early 1990s – quite possibly before some of today’s “design” gurus were born – learning about desktop publishing and typography (for a system that had a coherent outline font system before platforms like the Macintosh and Windows did). Generally, you don’t tend to apply kerning to monospaced fonts like Courier: the big hint is the “monospaced” bit.
Apparently, the reason for this behaviour is something to do with the font library being used and it will apparently be fixed in future Firefox releases, or at least ones later than the one I happen to be using in Debian. Workarounds using configuration files reminiscent of the early 2000s Linux desktop experience apparently exist, although I don’t think they really work.
But anyway, well done to everyone responsible for this mess, whether it was someone’s great typographic “design” vision being imposed on everyone else, or whether it was just that yet more technologies were thrown into the big cauldron and stirred around without any consideration of the consequences. I am sure yet more ingredients will be thrown in to mask the unpleasant taste, also conspiring to make all our computers run more slowly.
Sometimes I think that “modern Web” platform architects have it as their overriding goal to reproduce the publishing solutions of twenty to thirty years ago using hardware hundreds or even thousands of times more powerful, yet delivering something that runs even slower and still producing comparatively mediocre results. As if the aim is to deliver something akin to a turn-of-the-century Condé Nast publication on the Web with gigabytes of JavaScript.
But maybe, at least for the annoyance described here, the lesson is that if something is barely worth doing, largely because it is probably only addressing someone’s offended sense of aesthetics, maybe just don’t bother doing it. There are, after all, plenty of other things in the realm of technology and beyond that more legitimately demand humanity’s attention.