Ligatures for Logic

A ligature in typesetting is a way of presenting two (or more) consecutive characters differently the individual characters would be displayed. For example, “fi” is often rendered with the top of the ‘f’ dotting the ‘i’. Here’s an example from Computer Modern, the default font in LaTeX.

Usually the difference is subtle—ordinarily readers are not consciously aware of them—but a ligature could look entirely different from its components. The previous post is an example of the latter: the two-letter abbreviation for a country is rendered as the flag of that country.

I’ve been playing around with Fira Code, a font with ligatures for programming. Fonts like this aim to do for programming what ordinary ligatures do for prose. For example, a programming font might include a ligature to render >= as ≥.

Programming fonts are obviously intended for use in programming, but I personally don’t like the idea of using ligatures in programming. They compromise the simplicity of plain text [1]. They’re supported in some environments but not in others, or they require some fiddly configuration before they’ll work, etc.

Still, I like the aesthetics of Fira Code, particularly in the way it handles logic symbols. Here are some examples comparing a common monospace font and Fira Code.

The image above is a screen shot of a document created in LibreOffice Writer. The ligatures didn’t work when I tried using them in Microsoft Word.

The Fira Code was designed as a monospace font, but has been extended to include proportional fonts. Fira Code with a proportional font might be useful in prose documents. You could insert a few symbols with a couple key strokes rather than searching for the symbol or entering Unicode.

However, it seems most of Fira Code’s ligatures are only available in monospaced versions of the font. If you use Fira Code in a prose document, you could switch from proportional font to monospace font just for an occasional symbol. It’s unclear whether that would be more or less work than other alternatives.

There’s one place where I believe Fira Code would be ideal: code examples inside a prose document. In that context you care about aesthetics and you want a monospaced font. Here again are some examples comparing Inconsolata and Fira Code.

Related links

• Logic Twitter account
• Typesetting modal logic
• Large-scale logic

[1] If you use Fira Code font, your code doesn’t change a bit. You can have some aesthetic improvements along with the advantages of working in plain text. But it may not just work without some research and experimentation.