You can turn them off with every font. But you’ll be surprised by how much they can improve readability, because they remove optical irritation as shown here.
So what I see there is that badly designed fonts require ligatures to correct interactions.
Like, I get that there are some neat ones, e.g. I have them turned on when writing code for symbols, but they seem wholly unnecessary and distracting in alphabetical characters.
But I’m also the kind of weirdo that thinks the world needs more monospace fonts.
I’m not a fan of the way the lowercase L’s tail interacts with uppercase letters, but other than that it’s not bad!
The “fi” combination also seems problematic since they seem to intersect.
That’s a ligature, it’s deliberate.
To me, that’s even worse. Ligatures that have 0 separation where it’s expected short circuit my reading comprehension.
You can turn them off with every font. But you’ll be surprised by how much they can improve readability, because they remove optical irritation as shown here.
So what I see there is that badly designed fonts require ligatures to correct interactions.
Like, I get that there are some neat ones, e.g. I have them turned on when writing code for symbols, but they seem wholly unnecessary and distracting in alphabetical characters.
But I’m also the kind of weirdo that thinks the world needs more monospace fonts.
/shrug