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Bug 27889 - pick up font-indicated default ligatures without having to specify liga=1
Summary: pick up font-indicated default ligatures without having to specify liga=1
Status: RESOLVED INVALID
Alias: None
Product: CSS
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Fonts (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Hardware: PC Windows NT
: P2 normal
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: John Daggett
QA Contact: public-css-bugzilla
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Reported: 2015-01-24 00:36 UTC by Mike Kamermans
Modified: 2015-01-26 00:43 UTC (History)
0 users

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Description Mike Kamermans 2015-01-24 00:36:10 UTC 
In fonts that come with default ligatures that should simply always be turned on, it seems counter-roductive to require that the "liga" feature be enabled in CSS as well. The expectation would be that those ligatures "just work", because the font indicates this always.

Smallest demonstrator I have is the font used in http://pomax.github.io/CFF-glyphlet-fonts/, which has a default GSUB ligature to replace '~', as well as the string 'custom', neither of which work without explicitly turning on the liga opentype feature in CSS.
Comment 1 John Daggett 2015-01-26 00:43:35 UTC 
Hi Mike,

The mechanism by which ligatures "just work" is that OpenType defines a set of features that should be applied by default, which is precisely what good layout applications do. The wording of the CSS3 Fonts spec is that user agents should apply these default features to all text. Currently only Firefox does this but I expect Chrome will at some point switch to doing this also.

So I don't think there's anything here that's a spec bug per se, you should be filing bugs against Chrome and Webkit since they don't implement default feature support (it needs to be enabled explictly or via 'text-rendering: optimizeLegibility').