Upstream FiraCode drops OTF

[zraffer]

(currently) the Ligaturizer is based on usage of OTF variants of FiraCode

recently the upstream has dropped generating the OTFs into distr directory, thus making usage of Ligaturizer impossible against decent versions of Fira Code

the source issue: https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode/issues/939

[gaplo917]

@zraffer This is not only a OTF variant issues.

The sad news is FiraCode changed the way of building the ligatures https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode/issues/1100#issuecomment-658741372

All hyphen and equals-based arrows, underscores and numbersigns were removed as individual characters in 4. They are now built from segments to allow for infinite-length arrows

The current implementation of Ligaturizer use individual characters to build the ligatures that means it only could support up to FiraCode v3.

Without doing the extra implementation of handling FiraCode v4/v5 's segments and just convert .ttf to .otf, the result would become https://github.com/gaplo917/Ligatured-Hack/issues/3

[akhilesh-balaji]

Is there a way to just get the new ligatures in Fira Code 3 and up, then? I'm more concerned about getting the new and updated ligatures than the incredibly long arrows that it supports.

[ToxicFrog]

The issue isn't just with incredibly long arrows; it's that to support those arrows, Fira 4+ has fundamentally changed the way ligatures are stored in the font. So we could probably update to Fira 3, and get those ligatures, but Fira 4 or higher won't work without a significant redesign even if we don't care about infinite-length arrows.