hm. turns out if you make adjacent characters two different colors in LibreOffice, it forgets that it can kern them (i.e. moving "r." closer together). so a simple color substitution just changed my text layout. even though it definitely was not a ligature (i can understand why this would break up ligatures, like "=>" going from an arrow to its components if the components are different colors. but when they're clearly not one symbol i don't see why they need to be broken up)
@nyastrid@computerfairi.es hm. a gradient definitely sucks for kerning. but that's ... an interesting way to deal with multicolored ligatures. i think i might prefer that over vscode just drawing a hard line down the middle of the ligature (although it has a clear point to draw that line; where the monospace character bounding boxes touch)
It's not really generalizable to other styling, like font weight or italicization. but maybe ligatures could be constructed to support such edge cases? maybe ligatures could hint where such dividers are best drawn (e.g. "->" should color the entire spine as the left color, and only the wings as the right color. as opposed to the way vscode does it for Fira Code today, with half the spine being left color and half the spine being the right color. something similar could be hinted about boldness)?