No normal person would care, but Microsoft has finally added support for OpenType ligatures in Microsoft Word 2010 (Word 14)….

I used to refer to “Word”, but now I’m calling it “Office”—just to see the ligature.

As for gentlemen in litagures using ligatures, well, I’m not sure if “litagures” exists as its own word at all, although “litigation” must come from a root. Well, I’ll let it pass. Thanks again.

I’m going off the explanations of standard, discretionary, and contextual ligatures here. Depending on the font that you select, you may get ligatures that you don’t want if you select All.

Selecting Standard Only ensures that you get the, well, standard ligatures that you would probably want, without stuff that you don’t (especially historical alternates). Experiment if you like.

There is no performance difference, and I don’t know why Microsoft doesn’t enable the few typographical features that Word supports by default.

I mean, just suppose for a moment that there was a word-processing program that allowed a person to select ligature selections such as
None
Standard Only
Standard and Contexted
Historic and Discretionary
All
. . .and some kind of street-ruffian chanced upon that, and allowed his addictive-impulsive personality disorder to choose “All”. In what ways would that [further] ruin his life, and, as an older, wiser man, reminiscing on what he would do over again in another life, specifically why would he list it among his regrets? Would “All” have slowed his computer down, for example, or would it have turned all his writing into Ancient Greek, or would it have—well, WHAT would its downside have been?

I am sorry to bother you, but I have misplaced my LIGATURES FOR IMBECILES book. Thank you very much for your kind explanation. (By the way, I agree with those saying SpanDeX is best for professional writing. I always wear it myself. It lets me stretch for my coffee, and also, after too many hours of word-processing, the bright pink colour alerts me to what components belong to the computer and which are parts of my body.) Thanks again.

http://nitens.org/taraborelli/latex

Actually, it’s done by Mac OS X, so all apps have access to it. Even TextEdit (Wordpad’s equivalent) supports this

If you care, you’re probably already using TeX or LaTeX… furthermore you probably don’t give a stuff about Word because once you’ve learned TeX or LaTeX you’re much more productive anyway (and you can do it in vi or emacs depending on your religious persuasion). Of course, this might finally make documents look professional (though people will stuff it up with bad design choices).

Microsoft, why did this take so long? Oh and Apple’s Pages ‘09 already does this (I just checked).