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I wonder if at some point your e-book went through macOS's Preview program.

At work I sometimes have to copy blocks of text from a PDF into another document. If I do it with Preview, I lose the fi and fl ligatures. It only happens with PDFs created in-house, so I guess it's some kind of stylistic thing that comes from the guy who lays out the PDFs.

I eventually learned to use Adobe's own Acrobat, instead, and it works fine.

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Please send to bugreport.apple.com

I'd argue this is a feature and not a bug. When copy-pasting text from PDFs, I'd love to not have to deal with unicode and ligatures. There's another comment upthread here where someone's complaining about having to deal with unicode.

If Preview can do this automatically, please don't change that feature.

I think the GP commentor meant that the ligatures are converted lossfully into an arbitrary substituant character (e.g. fl -> l), rather than that they’re taken apart losslessly.

For clarity, I was describing how in Preview fl -> NULL.

Preview for some reason just drops it entirely.

In Acrobat, fl -> f and l adjacent.

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