Menlo for Powerline allows ligatures

[jeroenh]

The latest version of iTerm2 has somehow enabled ligatures to be displayed, and for some reason they are available in the Menlo for Powerline font, but not in the Menlo font itself.

The problem is best explained with a screenshot:

The f and l are combined into a single symbol, thus messing up the fixed width nature of the font, and it messes up the display of the cursor in interesting ways also.

[fedemp]

👍 Same thing happening here using urxvt and Meslo. The original font works great but consecutive letters like fi are combined.

[Lokaltog]

That's a really weird issue. I have no idea why that occurs with only the patched font. Maybe FontForge removes or replaces some font setting that controls ligature display when patching the font?

[jeroenh]

Note that I don't have this problem anymore with the latest versions of iTerm2

[NeoPolus]

I have the same problem, "fl" and "fi" use the same space as a single character, so it's no longer a 'fixed-width' font :(

The problem exists in both Menlo and Meslo powerline fonts, both in the terminal and Gedit (I'm using Linux Mint 17.3)

[lilyball]

I just reproduced this using TextEdit. Thankfully Terminal.app disables ligatures, but a monospaced font should be monospaced in all contexts, not just terminals.

[lilyball]

It looks like Menlo actually includes ligatures already, but the Typography option "Common Ligatures" is off by default. The Powerline font patcher produces a font where it's on by default.