Ligature remover — turn fi, fl and friends back into letters

A ligature is two or more letters drawn as one glyph: fi instead of f-i, fl instead of f-l, æ instead of a-e. Typesetters love them because they fix the collisions a nice font produces; databases and search engines hate them because file is not file — it is one different character, and no exact match, sort or dedupe survives the difference. Paste such text into a form, a CMS or a CSV and the failures start immediately: words that will not be found, duplicates that look identical, IDs that fail a validator.

Ligatures usually ride in with the source. PDF text layers from typesetting tools, e-book exports, old scanned documents run through OCR, LaTeX output and certain fonts all emit the single-codepoint forms. The moment the text leaves that world — a search box, a database field, a plain-text email — the glyphs stop being typography and become typos. This page expands them all back to their plain letters in one pass.

The tool covers the Latin ligature set: ff fi fl ffi ffl (the f-family), æ Æ and œ Œ (the digraphs), ij IJ (Dutch), and the sharp-s pair ß and ẞ, which many pipelines also want as ss and SS. The counter above is the number of characters replaced. If the count is 0 and text still misbehaves, the culprit is probably an invisible hyphen or a run of spaces — the soft-hyphen remover and the extra-spaces remover are the tools for those.