[XeTeX] suppressing common ligatures and kerning

[Ralf Stubner]

Florian Grammel <grammel at gmx.net> writes:

> In LaTeX the command \/ suppresses common ligatures, e.g.. in  
> composites like germ. Auf\/lauf.

I think it is better to use "| provided by babel. This inserts a small
space (\kern.03em) and allows hyphenation at that point.

The correct way wrt to Unicode would be to input a zero-width
non-joiner U+200C between f and l. Adding some kerning between f and
ZWNJ or between ZWNJ and l could eliminate the overlapping of f and l.

Depending an the font used, you should not remove this overlapping
completely, though. In fonts like Minion or Adobe Garamond you would get
a large hole in words like 'Auflage'. One can argue that such fonts are
not suitable for typesetting German ...

cheerio
ralf