Strangely, some team members believe that disabling ligatures would not be correct according to the font standard (even though I can’t tell which one) and the font maker’s expectations... they think these should be honored for default Open Type.

I personally can’t agree with it.
Bad taste or not, we can FORCE Ai to use Optical kerning with modifying [Basic Paragraph Style]... (for me it’s a more serious crime, but Ai allows it nonetheless). Not seeing why OpenType Features should be immune...
Toggling Standart Ligatures button doesn’t make an opened document profile dirty, so one can’t make it a default option for a new doc.

Same as Magic Wand tolerance — and people beg to change this value to 0 by default (or make sticky) — http://illustrator.uservoice.com/forums/333657/suggestions/35662705.

I suppose this just needs more votes then.

Is there any update on this? This would be a great QOL improvement. Seems easy to implement.

Ligatures are a problem when generating accessible PDFs: they all result in a 'Character Encoding - Failed' error. We need a universal preference to turn them off by default.

Hi Adobe dev team.

I struggle to understand many of the AI defaults.

Its somehow as if the team doesnt know their users needs. Ligatures and hyphenation should be off, magic wand tolerance should be 0, HSB default sliders needed etc.

Years of open requests that are so easy to fix. No replies from the team after users take time to write detailed descriptions of the issues. The collective energy customers put into making the requests is greater than it would take one dev to fix them. And the fixes are obvious to anyone using the product.

Whats going on behind the scenes over there?

Totally agree. This should never have been defaulted as ON. Adobe please change this.

Agreed! I don't know when this happened, but I all of a sudden started getting character encoding errors in accessibility checking and found ligatures had somehow become active by default in Illustrator. I have to remember now to select all of the text, unclick the ligatures button and then save again when I am exporting to PDF for the web. Annoying!

Hate having to turn off ligatures every time I do a new packaging artwork - all my FI letters turning into a Glyph!

+1 I have been having trouble with certain fonts that have a glitch where the Ligatures option is disabled even though the font carries Ligature glyphs. Would like to have the default to be off for the ligatures also!