Josef “Jeff” Sipek

A recent upgrade of FreeBSD on my desktop resulted in just about every program (Firefox, KiCAD, but thankfully not urxvt) rendering various ligatures even for monospaced fonts. Needless to say, this is really annoying when looking at code, etc. Not having any better ideas, I asked on Mastodon if anyone knew how to turn this mis-feature off.

About an hour later, @monwarez@bsd.cafe suggested dropping the following XML in /usr/local/etc/fonts/conf.avail/29-local-noto-mono-fixup.conf and adding a symlink in ../conf.d to enable it:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "urn:fontconfig:fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
	<description>Disable ligatures for monospaced fonts to avoid ff, fi, ffi, etc. becoming only one character wide</description>
	<match target="font">
		<test name="family" compare="eq">
			<string>Noto Sans Mono</string>
		</test>
		<edit name="fontfeatures" mode="append">
			<string>liga off</string>
			<string>dlig off</string>
		</edit>
	</match>
</fontconfig>

This solved my problem. Hopefully this will help others. if not, it’s a note-to-self for when I need to reapply this fixup :)

I’m going to try something new. Instead of sharing individual links per post as I come across them, I’m going to try to dump them whenever I have enough of them. It does mean that some of these links aren’t as “hot off the press”. Here’s the first batch.

How We’re Predicting AI — or Failing To

How Typography Shapes Our Perception Of Truth

Bitcoin mining on a 55 year old IBM 1401 mainframe: 80 seconds per hash

What is the difference between an “aggregate” and other kinds of “modified versions”?

SourceForge grabs GIMP for Windows’ account, wraps installer in bundle-pushing adware

 Speed tape looks like duct tape but isn’t.