[cmdahler]

Originally Posted by frabjous

So long as the font contains the ligatures, you should be able to use them in an ePub, but you'd have to do the find and replace yourself. Actually doesn't sound so hard, but it would depend on what format the source document is in. The trickiest thing if it's in HTML format, for example, would be avoiding replacing e.g., "fi" with the ligature when it's inside a tag.

Yes, that would work as a pretty kludgy workaround if one just really, really wanted or for some reason needed ligatures. But you're right, that would mess up a dictionary, so you'd probably only want to do that in really limited parts of the document that demanded it for some reason.

InDesign might even have a command to do it. Not sure. Never used it.

There's no specific command that would do what you're saying aside from a simple find-and-replace. InDesign, of course, uses ligatures automatically if told to do so, but that formatting is all lost when the doc is exported as an epub.

But the quotes issue... I haven't investigated it that thoroughly myself, but it doesn't sound as if it would be so hard as people say to autocorrect these.

It isn't hard at all, and that's the point: every time I see an ebook with straight quotes, that just screams LAZY to me and means by default that I'm going to find about a million other formatting errors and spelling and punctuation errors in the first 20 pages alone. It ruins the whole reading experience to me. Some people evidently don't mind.