Lato font not separating letters ft and ti

Question

I am using the Lato font for a document, but whenever the letters "ft" and "ti" are next to eachother, this font cannot separate the characters. When doing a copy-paste of the word in the output pdf-viewer, weird things happen as "ti" is considered as one letter.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont{Lato}

\begin{document}
Simulations \huge{\textbf{Institute, simulations}}
\end{document}

Output:

This should not be the usual output. As one can try on the website https://fonts2u.com/lato-regular.font?ptext=Simulations the output should look like this (space separation between "t" and "i")

Answer 1

Apparently, the Lato TrueType font has peculiar ligatures, besides the really standard ones, in the liga (Standard Ligatures) feature.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont{Lato}

\begin{document}

Institute, simulations

flagstaff finicky official

\end{document}

On the other hand, this is what I get from copy-pasting here the text from the PDF file:

Institute, simulations
flagstaff finicky official

so the strange ligatures are split in the process.

You can disable the ligatures, but you can only disable all of them.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont{Lato}[
 Ligatures=NoCommon,
]

\begin{document}

Institute, simulations

flagstaff finicky official

\end{document}

Actually, this is even better: the glyph shapes don't really need ligatures.

Answer 2

This font family behaves in surprising ways. One should be able to turn off the ligatures you dislike in this way:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\directlua{
  fonts.handlers.otf.addfeature{
    name = "noft",
    type = "multiple",
    data = {
      ['f_f_t.liga'] = { "f", "f", "t" },
      ['f_t.liga'] = { "f", "t" },
      ['t_t_i.liga'] = { "t", "t", "i" },
      ['t_i.liga'] = { "t", "i" },
    },
  }
}
\setsansfont{Lato}[RawFeature=+noft]
\begin{document}
\sffamily
Institute attic simulations pfft baffle five flying officials
\end{document}

However, the output is full of the t-ligatures.

If you want the standard ligatures without the others, turn off liga and add back the desired ligatures as rlig (which is on by default):

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\directlua{
  fonts.handlers.otf.addfeature{
    name = "rlig",
    type = "ligature",
    data = {
      ['ffi'] = { "f", "f", "i" },
      ['ffl'] = { "f", "f", "l" },
      ['ff'] = { "f", "f" },
      ['fi'] = { "f", "i" },
      ['fl'] = { "f", "l" },
    },
  }
}
\setsansfont{Lato}[Ligatures=NoCommon]
\begin{document}
\sffamily
Institute attic simulations pfft baffle five flying officials
\end{document}

I can think of no reason why this second approach works but not the first. The solution requires compiling with lualatex.

Answer 3

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[default]{lato}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

\begin{document}
Simulations \huge{\textbf{Institute, simulations}}
\end{document}