My Client Dislikes Ligatures

Most artists, who love typography, love InDesign. Why? The ability to format beautiful type more quickly and more easily than ever. The automatic insertion of Ligatures for certain letter combinations such as ff, fi, ffi, ffl and more (depending upon the typeface), are an obvious part of that beautiful type formatting. These letter combinations, which can suffer from awful character spacing are replaced by specially designed alternate Glyphs called Ligatures to solve these spacing problems beautifully. While looking over a proof of an ad, one of my clients asked, “Where's the dot over the letter ‘i' in the word ‘figure,' and why is the ‘f' connecting to that ‘l' in the word ‘flab'? I like my type to look like the letters I'm used to.” “Barbarian,” I thought. I tried explaining the beauty of Ligatures to no avail. So I had to get rid of them. I selected, all of the text, and unchecked ‘Ligatures' under the Options menu of the Character panel.

Tip provided by Jeff Witchel, Adobe® Certified Training Provider. AdobeAce@comcast.net