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Ligatures set by Latex are often wrong in German (i.e. between combined words like "Auflaufform"). To set these words correct I often use rmligs which is a great tool to disable ligatures when the use of them would be wrong.

rmligs places a "| between the letters of a "wrong ligature".

Unfortunately the use of "| doesn't work for me if I use xelatex and fontspec (it seems to require babel).

Is there a correct method to disable ligatures when I'm forced to use xelatex and fontspec?

This is not a question about disabling only specific ligatures or disable ligatures generally.

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  • 2
    Is using LuaLaTeX instead of XeLaTeX an option for you? If it is, you could use the selnolig package (with language option ngerman) to suppress ligatures selectively.
    – Mico
    Commented Jun 24, 2014 at 14:22
  • 5
    What's the problem in using babel along with fontspec?
    – egreg
    Commented Jun 24, 2014 at 14:26

2 Answers 2

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I tried running rmligs on the following file

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[ngerman]{babel}
\usepackage{fontspec}

\begin{document}
Auflaufform
\end{document}

This resulted in writing out

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[ngerman]{babel}
\usepackage{fontspec}

\begin{document}
Auf"|lauf"|form
\end{document}

which I ran XeLaTeX on, getting

enter image description here

The same result is obtained if the original file is

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[babelshorthands]{polyglossia}
\setmainlanguage[spelling=new]{german}
\usepackage{fontspec}

\begin{document}
Auflaufform
\end{document}
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  • Thank you, I got an error clash if using babel and polyglossia together and an Auflauf"|form as result. Now it works fine.
    – schmendrich
    Commented Jun 24, 2014 at 14:50
  • Hm. With texlive 2017 on a mac the polyglossa example produces ligatures for me. I would much prefer an automatic solution with xelatex.
    – Stefan Müller
    Commented Nov 26, 2017 at 9:51
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If using LuaLaTeX instead of XeLaTeX is an option for you, then running LuaLaTeX on

\documentclass[ngerman]{article}
\usepackage{fontspec,babel,selnolig}
\begin{document}
Auflaufform 

auffällig 

Stoffisolator
\end{document}

produces

enter image description here

without the need to run rmligs (or some other pre-preprocessor) on the input file.

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2
  • Thank you, this is good to know and I will give it a try.
    – schmendrich
    Commented Jun 24, 2014 at 15:21
  • 1
    @Sverre - Many thanks for the edit! :-)
    – Mico
    Commented Jun 24, 2014 at 15:36

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