Expanding ligatures in search

[philipt18]

I know this is a bit obscure, but I would appreciate it if when searching text, that ligatures like œ and æ show results as if they were oe and ae (and visa versa). I suppose there could be options so if I really only want the results that have the actual ligature, then that could be possible, but I think in most cases when searching I'd want all the results. Maybe color the ligature differently in the search results if it wouldn't have been found in a straight search.

I'm sure there are some other similar ligatures, especially if you start looking at other languages and alphabets. I can think of a few in Hebrew, but as Affinity doesn't yet support RTL languages, I guess that's a moot point.

[Oufti]

I understand your point but for myself I have to say I don't share it.

There are ligatures that are desired for typographic or æsthetic reasons (like fi, ß or ct) but that remain always two letters, in one character. These are quite well managed with OpenType features and should not cause problems nowadays.
But there are also old ligatures that have been promoted in some languages to the status of individual letters (like æ in Nordic languages or œ in French) and that we have to typeset distinctly, e.g. cœur and cœlacanthe but coexistence. 

In my practice of corrector, hunting for badly composed *coeur and the like, I first search/replace at once for all oeu→œu, then I search/replace manually remaining every oe — since words with oeu are almost inexistent in French, where oe and œ are both common. 

Thus for me it's very important that both occurrences œ/oe are well distinguished in the results of search/replace. 

@philipt18: as things are now, I think you could use regex search to find both oe/œ. — I don't know enough about it to guide you through that but others will maybe. 

[kenmcd]

6 hours ago, philipt18 said:

I'm sure there are some other similar ligatures, especially if you start looking at other languages and alphabets.

Most search and/or spell-check apps understand that the fi (U+FB01) single character ligature is the same as f+i - two separate characters.
And they work either way.

Same with the other legacy ligatures which have a single code point.

So your request is not that odd.
Some apps may already do this for œ etc.

Same thing happens with characters with/without the accents.
Many apps accommodate it either way.

Note: if you look in the spellcheck dictionary files used in Affinity apps you can see how they handle the ligatures.