Spell checks and Find should accommodate ligatures (single characters each
representing "ae", "oe", "th", "ff", "fi", etc.), which are sometimes used in
traditional Latin-alphabet typesetting, to save a little space and for style,
and in quotations, and they should accommodate diacriticals either present or
absent (e.g., a search for Francoise should find Francoise with a cedilla in
either string but not the other).

This for a spelling check only requires that the internal dictionaries be
searched for character strings that correspond to ligatures and logically
expanded to include the resulting additional forms. An alternative method is for
the search function to convert entered substrings into or from ligatures before
comparing to dictionaries. The latter method is also applicable to Find. The
latter method is also adaptable for diacriticals.

Users should be able to turn such a default off and thus apply literalness.

As an extra enhancement, a checkboxed list of all known ligatures should be
offered, so that a user can search and replace in favor of all of them in one
sweep without having to remember and type each one separately into a search box
or create and store a complex regex. Multiligature search would be more useful
if it turns out that a desired font has only a subset of ligatures in its glyph
set or if some are especially unattractive and to be avoided.

I'm using OOo Writer 2.4.0 without Java Runtime Environment on Linux Fedora Core
4 with Gnome 2.10.0 desktop on a Pentium 4 laptop. I didn't see this feature.

Thank you.

-- 
Nick