Is there a way to ask Prince to use ligature glyphs for fi and fl without introducing ligature charecters in XML source?

I am using Palatino (shipped by Apple) on OS X. The font has the glyphs and the mapping for the relevant Unicode ligature code points.

Not yet; support for automatic generation of ligatures will be added to Prince in a future release.

We have now released the first beta of Prince 7.0, which supports automatic ligatures found in OpenType fonts.

In a test document I made using Lucida Grande, it didn't seem to use the ff, fi ligatures, etc. :?

Are you running Prince on MacOS X? Unfortunately we don't support Apple Advanced Typography (AAT) fonts yet, as they are completely different to OpenType fonts, and it appears that Apple will gradually be switching to OpenType for compatibility with the rest of the world.

I am running Mac OS X. I also noticed this problem with Hoefler Text. Is the problem with .dfont files then?

I suspect that this will affect all of the default fonts that ship with MacOS X, as they are TrueType fonts extended with AAT tables, and do not contain tables for OpenType advanced layout features. Unfortunately this means that a lot of the hard work we put into Prince 7.0 will not be immediately obvious on MacOS X unless you install some additional fonts.