4 ms·

It also makes no sense and looks terrible to connect those two glyphs with a ligature. Unlike "fi" or "ij", there's no reason (kerning or spelling) to want to s

• weinzierl 2y ago
  I don't doubt that but I cannot really pinpoint what the reason is to want "fi" and "ij" in a monospace font? Do these narrow letter ligatures then take up only a single character cell?
  • stevesimmons 2y ago
    If you're Dutch, "ij" is a technically a single letter, and may sometimes be written as "y". (Traditionally, Dutch words are sorted alphabetically with "ij" treated as if it were "y". On my first visit to Amsterdam, pre-Google Maps, I had the bizarre experience of standing in one of the main streets, Vijzelstraat, but being unable to find it on my map. Its index of streets has nothing starting "Vij...". I sheepishly had to ask someone wtf was going on. He pointed me lower down to the end of the "V"s where all the "Vij..." street names were hiding!)
• WorldMaker 2y ago
  #{ in a few languages is a bit of a high-level operator like "start a record/object/hash table". The # is visually a bit like a handle on a coffee cup (which you are about to fill). The octothorpe (#) is also sometimes called a "hash", making it also a bit of a visual pun if it is indeed the start of a hash-table. (Think JSON object syntax in a language where you want to make sure you can't just accidentally write objects anywhere or confuse different uses of { such as starting a code block, so you put a handle on them.) "Smushing" it together makes it even more visually distinct as a "single" operator, further adds to the visual metaphor of the "coffee cup handle", maybe obscures the "hash" visual pun a little bit, but maybe not enough to care.