selnolig – Selectively disable typographic ligatures

The package suppresses typographic ligatures selectively, i.e., based on predefined search patterns. The search patterns focus on ligatures deemed inappropriate because they span morpheme boundaries. For example, the word shelfful, which is mentioned in the TeXbook as a word for which the ff ligature might be inappropriate, is automatically typeset as shelf\/ful rather than as shel{ff}ul.

For English and German language documents, the package provides extensive rules for the selective suppression of so-called “common” ligatures. These comprise the ff, fi, fl, ffi, and ffl ligatures as well as the ft and fft ligatures. Other f-ligatures, such as fb, fh, fj and fk, are suppressed globally, while exceptions are made for names and words of non-English/German origin, such as Kafka and fjord.

For English language documents, the package further provides ligature suppression macros for a number of so-called “discretionary” or “rare” ligatures such as ct, st, and sp.

The package requires use of a recent LuaLaTeX format (for example those from TeX Live 2012 or 2013, or MiKTeX 2.9).

Download the contents of this package in one zip archive (571.6k).