Characters with irregular spacing

[RaphaelSilva]

Some fonts have this thing that they glue certain characters together (I think it’s called ligature). It might look beautiful in some cases, but the problem is when you change characters spacing. Look what happens with the font Lato size 43 pt when spacing is set to 6 pt:

It looks horrible and makes me ill.

Is there anything I can do about it?
I’m using LibreOffice Writer 5.4.3 on Ubuntu 16.04.

I was able to get the spacing I wished by inserting a tiny space between the linked characters (image below), but that’s actually a really ugly solution.

[mikekaganski]

I suppose that it’s a good enhancement request - that the ligatures be disabled when spacing isn’t single. But it should be filed to bug tracker.

[RGB-es]

Since 5.3 you can manage OpenType features quite easily. To disable ligatures just add :-liga to the font name. In your case it would be

Lato:-liga

I wrote an article about OpenType features and LibreOffice for Opensource.com site (more to come on my personal blog):

How the OpenType font system works

[RaphaelSilva]

This is very useful! And so is your article! I had no idea we could use these tags on LibreOffice.