Suppressing ligatures

A ligature is a combination of several letters in a single glyph. Ligatures improve the readability and visual quality of text, and thus, we should retain them. However, there may be a reason to disable them – for example, in verbatim text, such as source code.

Furthermore, it’s possible that searching or copying ligatures in a PDF file would fail, which we discussed in the previous recipe.

How to do it...

We will now see how to deactivate ligatures. We will use the microtype package:

1. Load the microtype package:

   \usepackage{microtype}

2. Disable ligatures entirely:

   \DisableLigatures{encoding = *, family = * }

3. If you would like to restrict that feature to a certain font, you can specify it instead, such as the following:

   \DisableLigatures{encoding = T1, family = tt* }

4. You can even suppress just selected ligatures using the following command. Specify the letter that starts the ligature:

   \DisableLigatures[f]{encoding = *, family...