[jfk13]

Actually, IE5 didn't do automatic ligatures; what you see in "finibus" is simply an "f" glyph and an "i" glyph which are close enough that the dot of the "i" nestles into the top-right of the curve of the "f", and the serifs at the base run together... just like they do for the "in" and "ni" pairs following.

(It was possible to render a real fi glyph, but only by using the Unicode presentation-form code point U+FB01; IE5 didn't do automatic ligatures in Latin script, and even if it did, Times New Roman did not have the OpenType support for that.)

It does appear that the IE5 screenshot shows significantly tighter letter spacing in general than the body text, which is why we see the "fi" glyphs touching in IE5 whereas they're separate in the text of the page. I guess that's probably related to size-specific glyph metrics or hinting that is snapping the glyph advances to a narrower width than the "fake-bitmap" font produces.

[tomxor]

> Actually, IE5 didn't do automatic ligatures; what you see in "finibus" is simply an "f" glyph and an "i" glyph which are close enough that the dot of the "i" nestles into the top-right of the curve of the "f", and the serifs at the base run together.

That's actually a really neat solution in the absence of explicitly defined ligatures... since there is no antialiasing, it only needs a little care when designing the font at the pixel level and choice of kerning and the result will be indistinguishable. fi is a very geometrically natural ligature though, i wonder if it doesn't work so well for others that are too dissimilar to their components.