Devanagari: conjunct alignment what looks worse?

James Puckett

In most Devanagari fonts there are half-form + conjunct consonant pairs that do not align in any attractive way. What do Indian readers consider least unsightly: connecting the two glyphs even though they misalign and might impair legibility, or leaving a small gap between them?

John Hudson

If the conjuncts are ones that actually occur in text, then there really isn't any excuse for them to look bad. Make a ligature or use contextual variant half and full forms to make the connection work properly. Yes, one observes such bad connections in many fonts: there are a lot of bad fonts.