Unwanted ligatures

I want to use a font from fonts.google.com and am running into an issue.

I’ve included the font (Nunito) like so:

const nunitoBoldUrl =
  "https://fonts.gstatic.com/s/nunito/v12/XRXW3I6Li01BKofA6sKUYevIWzgPDA.woff2";
const nunitoBoldFontBytes = await fetch(nunitoBoldUrl).then((res) => res.arrayBuffer());

const nunitoBold = await pdfDoc.embedFont(nunitoBoldFontBytes);

This works, with one exception (there might be more, but this is what I could find):

Printing fi adds unwanted spacing after it which shouldn’t be there, the Google preview also doesn’t show it.

fi ir fir:

I think the font has a special ligature for fi, if I install the font on my system I get the same connected f and i letters, but without the spacing. Is this an issue with pdf-kit or fontkit?

[Hopding]

Version 1.14.0 includes an API that can disable font ligatures (thanks to @hefler!): https://github.com/Hopding/pdf-lib/blob/c9577682b6176ead2bf5167418702db987e15b45/apps/node/tests/test6.ts#L37-L40

[Hopding]

Hello @zimt28 @fobdy! As far as I’m aware this is an issue with fontkit, though I haven’t been able to confirm this. If anybody is interested, it is possible to disable ligatures when performing text layout with fontkit (as @fobdy mentioned). You would just need to update the API to pass options here: https://github.com/Hopding/pdf-lib/blob/193e48ff2ce07d72f8191087adcdd01aa3c48a62/src/core/embedders/CustomFontEmbedder.ts#L52-L57

I’d be happy to accept a PR if anybody is interested in working on this.