[tomxor]

> Actually, IE5 didn't do automatic ligatures; what you see in "finibus" is simply an "f" glyph and an "i" glyph which are close enough that the dot of the "i" nestles into the top-right of the curve of the "f", and the serifs at the base run together.

That's actually a really neat solution in the absence of explicitly defined ligatures... since there is no antialiasing, it only needs a little care when designing the font at the pixel level and choice of kerning and the result will be indistinguishable. fi is a very geometrically natural ligature though, i wonder if it doesn't work so well for others that are too dissimilar to their components.