Suppressing ligatures

Ligatures raise the typographical quality and thus we should retain them. However, there may be a reason to disable them, for example, in verbatim text such as the source code.

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

How to do it...

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

1. Load the microtype package:

   \usepackage{microtype}

2. Disable ligatures completely:

   \DisableLigatures{encoding = *, family = * }

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

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

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

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

How it works...

Suppressing ligatures is one of the many features of the microtype package. Using the preceding interface, you can switch off some...