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.

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!