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Ligatures in Safari 1.2

Hidden away in Safari’s Debug Menu, there’s an option entitled “Use ATSU,” which turns on OS X’s ATSUI character rendering for Safari. I’m excited about it, since I mentioned it back when Dave Hyatt asked for suggestions for UI improvements in Safari. So here’s a little overview:

The following text uses strings of characters that collide with one another, or just look kind of ugly in certain typefaces:

offbeat fluffies

Notice how the repetition of the shapes in the characters “ff” looks a bit awkward, how “f” hits the “b” and “l” and how the “f” comes uncomfortably close to colliding with the “i’s” dot.

Typographers have created special characters called “ligatures” to gracefully avoid these collisions. With ATSUI, available ligatures are automatically substituted for offending character sequences. If you have OS X 10.3 and Safari 1.2, turn on the ATSU option the debug menu and refresh the page to see the ligatures. Everyone else, see the image below:

This is beautiful.

The only problem is that the overall kerning (the spacing between characters) is modified rather drastically. Check out the screenshots below from Safari with and without ATSU on and from TextEdit (animated gif):

Safari seems to use a slightly different version of ATSUI than other applications, which is strange. Safari’s ATSU kerning is much tighter in general than the normal kerning, but not as tight as TextEdit and I haven’t decided whether I like it yet. It’s obviously still a beta feature that needs some work, otherwise it wouldn’t be hidden. I’m looking forward to the full implementation.

02/25/04 05:06PM Design Macintosh

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