I’ve designed a monospaced typeface. It’s intended for running text, not programming. There are three f ligatures (ff, fl, fi). Does it make sense to leave them in LIGA or should I stick them in DLIG to avoid confusing people? I’m inclined to go with LIGA because it looks cool and most people have no idea how to use discretionary ligatures. But before I do I’m checking to see if there’s a way for this to go horribly wrong.
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With that in mind: why would you need a ligature -- any -- in a monospaced font?
The only reason /fi and /fl may appear as single character (!) in a monospaced font is not so it would be used as a "feature", but rather because these two are valid codepoints in a few legacy character sets.
Not only.
There is no `liga` feature, though there IS a `calt` (and many no-standard features) to support "programming ligation".
Here is an image of where this is proclaimed as a feature:
I have a few examples of monospaced ligatures on my Flickr, none of them entirely convincing.
As I recall, the practice in such typefaces as Palatino and Optima, where by design f never collided with i in roman, was to simply encode exactly the letters fi in default spacing in the fi slot.