On 2015-08-07 Hans Hagen wrote:

http://www.tomsguide.com/us/amazon-kindle-paperwhite,review-2967.html

I read under "Advanced Typesetting"

... improved character placement and spacing, with advanced kerning and ligatures ...books with this enhanced typesetting are not easy to find

which makes me wonder: how can an html file (just a char stream) determine in an epub that kerning/ligaturing is disabled By default?

(I can imagine a css enabling something but still ...)

There was lot of work in W3 recently dedicated in CSS for paged media. Even further development of mature XSL-FO has been discontinued in favor of HTML+CSS. http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/01/designing-for-print-with-css/ And many publishers believe this is the future. While many features are not available in browsers yet, there are corresponding JavaScript modules/polyfills which mimic the intended rendering so nothing stops the publishing industry from migrating their workflows into the new standards. One of such JavaScript framework is vivliostyle.js - http://vivliostyle.com/ Back to the original question, enabling/disabling font features can be done using CSS font-feature: http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-fonts/#font-rend-props Jan