Make Ligatures OFF by default and have a checkbox in Preferences > Type
Please make it possible to turn off all ligatures within the Preferences > Type dialog box, then make it Off by Default.

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Mark Fogarty commented
Totally agree. This should never have been defaulted as ON. Adobe please change this.
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AJ E. commented
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!
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Anonymous commented
Hate having to turn off ligatures every time I do a new packaging artwork - all my FI letters turning into a Glyph!
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Mamoon Tayih commented
+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!