[HarfBuzz] Ligatures

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Cc: harfbuzz at lists.freedesktop.org
> From: Simon Cozens <simon at simon-cozens.org>
> Date: Sat, 23 May 2020 20:14:16 +0100
> 
> On 23/05/2020 08:44, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Thanks.  Since (b) is not really feasible without redesigning the
> > entire Emacs display engine (for which I see no volunteers lining up
> > any time soon), I guess we will have to use some more-or-less
> > reasonable and somewhat unreliable heuristics by supporting only some
> > ligatures that are known in advance.
> 
> Travelling further in the wrong direction is always an option, but don't 
> expect it to get you closer to the right destination.

I don't think this is an adequate analogy.  What Emacs does is an
approximation to what should be done.  The approximation falls short
of the target, that's true, and might even produce clearly incorrect
results in some cases (although I've yet to see such cases, and I'm
using Emacs for editing non-ASCII text for 20 years).  But it is still
an approximation, so it is not really "the wrong direction" (which you
seem to interpret as 180 degrees off, otherwise even going in the
wrong direction might bring me closer to the destination, right?).