diff --git a/src/datatrove/pipeline/formatters/ftfy.py b/src/datatrove/pipeline/formatters/ftfy.py
index 41c0f49f..a42f6294 100644
--- a/src/datatrove/pipeline/formatters/ftfy.py
+++ b/src/datatrove/pipeline/formatters/ftfy.py
@@ -1,11 +1,61 @@
+from typing import Literal
+
 from .base import BaseFormatter
 
 
 class FTFYFormatter(BaseFormatter):
+    """
+    General approach: fixing unreadable/wrong encoding text is good. Enforcing a specific/strict formatting isn't.
+    We want models to be able to recognize a wide variety of characters and formats, and not have a bunch of
+    unseen tokens because of strict normalization.
+    """
+
     name = "😎 FTFY"
     _requires_dependencies = ["ftfy"]
 
+    def __init__(
+        self,
+        # these two border a bit on the strict formatting, but they're mostly display related
+        unescape_html: str | bool = "auto",
+        remove_terminal_escapes: bool = True,
+        # this is the main thing we are interested in
+        fix_encoding: bool = True,
+        restore_byte_a0: bool = True,
+        replace_lossy_sequences: bool = True,
+        decode_inconsistent_utf8: bool = True,
+        fix_c1_controls: bool = True,
+        # all remaining ones will enforce a specific text format and models will not recognize non normalized text
+        # properly
+        fix_latin_ligatures: bool = False,
+        fix_character_width: bool = False,  # this enforces the WRONG punctuation for chinese and japanese
+        # (half-width instead of full-width)
+        uncurl_quotes: bool = False,  # while it makes sense, models then don't recognize curly quotes at all
+        fix_line_breaks: bool = False,  # on the fence about this one
+        fix_surrogates: bool = True,  # encoding related so ok
+        remove_control_chars: bool = True,  # they're literally useless
+        normalization: Literal["NFC", "NFD", "NFKC", "NFKD"] | None = None,  # no normalization
+    ):
+        super().__init__()
+        from ftfy import TextFixerConfig
+
+        self.config = TextFixerConfig(
+            unescape_html=unescape_html,
+            remove_terminal_escapes=remove_terminal_escapes,
+            fix_encoding=fix_encoding,
+            restore_byte_a0=restore_byte_a0,
+            replace_lossy_sequences=replace_lossy_sequences,
+            decode_inconsistent_utf8=decode_inconsistent_utf8,
+            fix_c1_controls=fix_c1_controls,
+            fix_latin_ligatures=fix_latin_ligatures,
+            fix_character_width=fix_character_width,
+            uncurl_quotes=uncurl_quotes,
+            fix_line_breaks=fix_line_breaks,
+            fix_surrogates=fix_surrogates,
+            remove_control_chars=remove_control_chars,
+            normalization=normalization,
+        )
+
     def format(self, text: str) -> str:
         import ftfy
 
-        return ftfy.fix_text(text)
+        return ftfy.fix_text(text, config=self.config)