[OS X TeX] converting ligatures into text

[Maarten Sneep]

On 22 apr 2005, at 15:37, Lawrence Paulson wrote:

>  I have to extract text from a large number of PDF documents produced 
> using TeX. Because (I presume) of TeX's non-standard font encodings, 
> cut and paste often goes wrong. In particular, ligatures get garbled: 
> I get di±cult instead of difficult.

What tool do you use to extract the text? Copy & paste from Acrobat? 
pdftotext (part of xpdf, you could compile it yourself, or get an 
installer from http://www.bluem.net/downloads/pdftotext_en/).

> Does anybody know of a program (or of a definitive set of replacements 
> that could be given to Perl) for cleaning up such text?

That would depend on the various encodings, and expectations of the 
encoding of the text in the file you create. I think this is a tough 
one to answer, in general.

Maarten
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