the combinations of ``fi'', ``fl'', and ``ffl'' you sometimes see in typesetting

As we're on a pedatry thread, I'll just say that I hate it when stupid publishers of technical books auto-replace "fi" with the fi-ligature etc. even in monospaced fonts, ones in which the fi-ligature takes up only one character space. That really sucks. And don't get me started on Kernighan and Richie and grave accent vs apostrophe vs sexed quotes.

Peter