Ligatures disabling

Question

I want to disable ligatures when I am typing letters, however, I need '--' to be joined to a long dash. Is it possible to make this?

Now I am avoiding it like this

\usepackage{microtype}
\DisableLigatures{encoding = *, family = * }

Answer 1

You can only do it the other way round as described in the documentation of microtype. You can give a list of chars for which ligatures should be disabled:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{microtype}
\DisableLigatures[f]{encoding = *, family = * }
\begin{document}
fi ---

\end{document}