Turbo SynEdit & Font Ligatures

[pyscripter 689]

Development of SynEdit at PyScripter has been moved to and merged with TurboPack SynEdit.  The focus of the development is to modernize the code base and enhance the functionality (sometimes at the expense of backward compatibility).  In addition to the earlier enhancements  and fixes two more features have been recently added:

• Per-monitor DPI awareness
• Support for Font Ligatures (new option eoShowLigatures)

 

Fonts like Cascadia Code and Fira Code contain ligatures relevant to programming. See this article for details.  Are you using font ligatures?  Do you like them?

 

See sample.  Thanks to vhanla for contributing the ligature support.

Edited September 22, 2020 by pyscripter

[MarkShark 27]

My goto has been Consolas, but this change seems a good one!  I'll have to look into those fonts.  BTW, having recently started to use Delphi Styles I'd love to see SynEdit support them.  Fortunately I get around it by adding:

 

  TCustomStyleEngine.RegisterStyleHook(TCustomSynEdit, TMemoStyleHook); // to get styled scrollbars
 

And then either changing the all the colors whenever the style changes OR by using the Vcl.Styles.Hooks unit.  I usually go with the hooks since I use a couple other controls that don't support styles fully (like spTbxDock and spTbxToolbar, which I've noticed you're doing some much needed work on!)  Fantastic work!

[theking2 0]

--deleted--

Edited October 15, 2022 by theking2

[David Heffernan 2345]

Not supported by the IDE

[Anders Melander 1782]

On 10/15/2022 at 12:23 PM, David Heffernan said:

Not supported by the IDE

Unless you've discovered the magic key to unlock it:

[David Heffernan 2345]

3 hours ago, Anders Melander said:

Unless you've discovered the magic key to unlock it:

How????? 

[Anders Melander 1782]

8 hours ago, David Heffernan said:

How?????  

The trigger is the presence of the "⁄" character anywhere in the text. It's the Unicode "Fraction Slash".

It can be reproduced with the GDI ExtTextOut function, which is how I accidentally discovered it.

 

I suspect that this is actually a bug in GDI because as far as I can tell there's nothing in the font tables that should require that character to be present before ligatures are applied. It could also be a bug in the font that triggers a bug in GDI; There are a lot of bugs in Cascadia and Fira.

 

Normally, in an OpenType shaper, the fraction slash triggers hardcoded logic ("hardcoded" as in "logic not defined in the OpenType tables") that converts numeric fractions from the form 1/2 to ½ but that requires the 'frac' feature to be enabled which it isn't by default.

[David Heffernan 2345]

5 minutes ago, Anders Melander said:

The trigger is the presence of the "⁄" character anywhere in the text.

That's pretty funky. Sadly not practical for actual use.