[throwaway848483]

Unrelated : In this article double f, like in "affected" are rendered with the second f bigger than the first (both on firefox and chromium). I looked inside the css editor and the font seems to be ("Libre Baskerville", Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif).

I guess this is probably to improve readability but it doesn't do this for other pairs of repeated letters.

It kind of sent me into a rabbit hole as I thought font were defined for a single letter only. I did a quick search and I couldn't find the rules which defined fonts. Is there some pattern matching for sequence of characters ? More importantly, when trying a new font how do we know that there aren't special cases like this ugly "ff" ?

[Arnavion]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typographic_ligature

Searching for "fonts ligatures" will give you more reading material.

>I guess this is probably to improve readability but it doesn't do this for other pairs of repeated letters.

Ligatures are mostly a style thing from the days of handwriting that got brought forward into print.

>Is there some pattern matching for sequence of characters ?

Yes, combinations are pre-defined in the font and picked up the renderer. In this particular case, LibreBaskerville defines a combination of two f's to render the first f in a slightly smaller size.

[jdefelice]

You can also control this with CSS using font-variant-ligatures.

[throwaway848483]

thanks