How to Turn Off Ligatures in Illustrator
In the following tutorial, you will learn what ligatures are, how to turn them on and off, and how you can add separate ligatures.
We'll use the Collina font from Envato Elements to better exemplify ligatures in Illustrator and learn how to turn off ligatures in Illustrator.



Interested in learning more about working with fonts in Illustrator? Check out these resources as well:
- How to Do Small Caps in IllustratorAndrei Marius08 May 2022
- How to Adjust the Font Size in IllustratorAndrei Marius14 Jun 2022
- How to Adjust Leading in IllustratorAndrei Marius04 Jul 2022
- A Beginner's Guide to the Character Panel in IllustratorAndrei Marius14 Jul 2022
What You Will Learn in This Illustrator Tutorial
- What are ligatures?
- How to turn off ligatures in Illustrator
- How to add separate ligatures in Illustrator
What Are Ligatures?
Ligatures are additional replacement characters for certain character combos, such as fi, fl, ff, ffi, ffl, and more. When you use ligatures in Illustrator, characters are glued together, giving your text a better flow.



Depending on the font, you can get ligatures for various character combinations with different ligature designs. The Collina font is pretty good example of a font with a unique set of ligatures.



How to Turn Off Ligatures in Illustrator
To turn off ligatures in Illustrator, first you need to open the OpenType panel. You can either go to Window > Type > OpenType or use the Alt-Shift-Control-T keyboard shortcut.
Make sure that your text is selected and just click the Standard Ligatures button to turn off ligatures in Illustrator. Additionally, you can deselect your text and disable the Standard Ligatures button if you also want to make sure that any new text you create won't use ligatures.
Return to this button whenever you wish to enable ligatures for an existing piece of text.



Alternatively, you can use the Standard Ligatures command from the fly-out menu of the OpenType panel to turn on and off ligatures in Adobe Illustrator.



How to Add Separate Ligatures in Illustrator
You can turn off ligatures in Illustrator, but still use one or more ligatures that might work for your design. Open the Glyphs panel (Type > Glyphs) and select Standard Ligatures from the dropdown menu to get access to all the ligatures that are available for the selected font.
Now, use the Type Tool (T) to select the character combination from your text and simply double-click the ligature from the Glyphs panel.



Congratulations! You're Done!
Now that you know how to work with ligatures in Adobe Illustrator, feel free to use the technique in your future projects.
You can find some great sources of inspiration at Envato Elements, with interesting solutions to improve your design portfolio.
Want to Learn More?
We have loads of tutorials on Envato Tuts+, from beginner to intermediate level. Take a look!
- Working With Type on a Path in IllustratorJulie Felton05 Jun 2021
- How to Curve Text in IllustratorMonika Zagrobelna31 Jul 2020
- How to Create a Blueprint Text Effect in Adobe IllustratorAndrei Marius19 Feb 2022
- How to Use the Blend Tool for Lettering in Adobe IllustratorLaura Keung03 Jan 2022
- How to Use Font Ligatures in InDesign, Photoshop & IllustratorLaura Keung04 Sep 2020
- How to Distress a Font in IllustratorAndrei Marius11 Sep 2020
