[crazygringo]

Wow, that's fascinating -- do you have a reference for that? I'd love to learn more, especially as to why -- it seems like that would just result in ugly typography. Or is it solely about the bar of the initial "f" connecting to the next letter?

[Johnny_Brahms]

Well, typography is often about readability. Removing the word boundary in compound nouns isn't really helpful since it removes a boundary that conveys meaning.

There were some examples of nouns where you should avoid ligatures in the TeX docs iirc. Shelfful and selffullfilling are the only ones I remember.

In German (every single fff on any page that bothers to set their own fancy-pants font) and swedish text you see it all the time, often coming from self-proclaimed typesetting/font nerds.