Today I came across a strange phenomenon on a website where there were multiple icons showing in the middle of words instead of regular characters. I soon noticed that every instance of an icon represented not one but two characters. And then it hit me.

The font used on this particular website provided ligatures which were then replaced by what appeared to be an ASCII icon representation of that single ligature character. Weird. Firing up the dev tools and setting the font-variant-ligatures property to none confirmed my suspicions. That’s what I learnt today.