I love the Linux Biolinum G and Linux Libertine G fonts, but the ligature handling is buggy, and I need some way to be able to make absolutely sure that it’s completely turned off, 100%, for a complete document (and ideally for any documents LO generates).
The problem is that I’m using LO to create papers to upload to the web as exported PDF files. With ligatures on, the machine-readable text version of the PDF document (used by Google, etc) doesn’t cleanly revert to the original text, and makes it look as if the document is full of childish spelling mistakes. This is “not a good look” on websites that let you upload PDFs and then show them as HTML-ised versions!
Sure, there’s the :-liga option at the style and local formatting levels … but it doesn’t always work properly. I’m looking at a PDF document right now that’s been set under LO with “Linux Libertine G:-liga”, and while most of the ligatures are correctly missing, the fi ligature seems to have snuck through - the text version of the PDF document still insists on showing every instance of “fi” as “fii”
This is making my life diffiicult, and I’m fiinding it really annoying. If there’s no reliable way to completely disable ligatures in PDF fiiles, and the -liga fiix can’t be relied on, then I’ll have to stop using the new fonts and fiind some other alternative font.