4 ms·
An intelligent discussion on ligatures for 'wtf' and 'lol'
- DougBTX 18y agoNot Startup News, but a very nice thread which I enjoyed reading.
- emmett 18y agoNot startup news, but definitely hacker news. See the jargon files for more of the same kind of hackers at play.
- pierrefar 18y agoI remember diving into ligatures when I was hacking my thesis in LaTeX. The geekiness of learning LaTeX made writing up tolerable. And the output was spectacular, if only in looks and not in content :)
- whacked_new 18y agoMore artistic than intelligent, IMHO, but very interesting, especially to see a forum so "moderated" by "creative forces." Also, it seems incorrect to call those ligatures: WP says those are when >= 2 graphemes combine into one glyph. i.e., the "fi" in print, or the Æ and such. Offtopic, found this cool character on the WP page: Ѽ. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligature_ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligature_(typography)
- mhb 18y agoPiggy butt?
- whacked_new 18y agomy first thought was tomato :)
- silentbicycle 18y agoYou need to escape the parens: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligature_%28typography%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligature_%28typography%29 (This should be in either the FAQ or the comment formatting notes (http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc), but isn't.)
- jrockway 18y agoLOL WTF! Just kidding. Normal ligatures look like the letters they represent. Look at "fish" for example. The ligature exists to make the dot on the i not conflict with the overhanging part of the f. These WTF and LOL ligatures don't look anything like the word they replace, so they should just be called "random new characters", not ligatures. Also, not all commonly used words get a special character. The, an, is, be, are, are more common than "et" and "at", but they don't have their own character. Anyway, I think this is more of an art project than anything else.