Is there a way to prevent automatic ligatures/glyphs in Cinzel Decorative font?

[Cat]

Not sure how to phrase this question, but when using the Cinzel Decorative font (and maybe in some other fonts too) if you put certain letters together they're automatically replaced with a decorative ligature or glyph. Here's an example, the "oo" gets replaced with a character that overlaps the letters.

Fun Black Tie Groomsman Wedding Foam Can Cooler | Zazzle

Same thing happens with "Th". I'm wondering if there's a way to prevent this behavior, or if I just need to use a different font. I had a customer complain about it in this design and I was able to get it to not replace by making it "OO" with capital letters instead of "oo" but that's not ideal because the capital letters have decorative elements that don't always work in the middle of a word. Just hoping there's some easy trick that I'm unaware of.

[Cat]

OK... I did a bit more research and I think I may have answered my own question. Turns out that the overlapping letters are not actually ligatures (where the two characters are being replaced with a single combined character) like I thought. It's actually an adjustment of the kerning that's built into the font. So it's not something that Zazzle's design tool is doing, it's built into the font. As far as I can tell the only way to get around it is to group two separate text strings together, which of course makes them un-editable by the customer. Just thought I'd post this in case anyone else is ever puzzling over this issue!

[Sara_H]

@Cat 

You can sort of get away with it by using uppercase O's with the rest being lower case eg grOOmsman - maybe?

edit - didn't fully read top post - (early morning and not had coffee) saw you already thought of that. Off to fill my coffee pot again. Need more 🙂 Happy Monday!

[Cat]

Hahaha! Great minds think alike! (They don't always read thoroughly, but they do think alike!) 🤣

[Jadendreamer13]

I actually like the overlapping “O’s.” They look like interlocking wedding rings. And I love that design.

[Cat]

Thanks! I like the overlapping "O's" too, but apparently at least one customer didn't! The one I don't like is that it smooshes "he" together into one letter.

Sure wish we could control the kerning on a per-letter basis like you can in PS or GIMP. Oh well, I guess it's an imperfect universe!