[XeTeX] Ligatures and searching in PDFs

[Peter Baker]

On 5/10/10 11:04 PM, Janusz S. Bień wrote:
>
> You are right:
>
> http://www.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/oberdiek/accsupp.pdf
>
> I was not aware of it.
>
> Best regards
>
> Janusz
>
>    
I've been very concerned about the searchability of PDFs and have begun 
to build Junicode in such a way that ligatures and small caps are 
searchable. In the version I posted the other day small caps are already 
searchable in PDFs; in the next formal release the same will be true of 
all ligatures covered by liga and dlig features (but not hlig: there are 
too many of those and they are too rarely used).

The problem is the way that MUFI (Medieval Unicode Font Initiative) 
assigns ligatures to code points in the PUA; for searchability, they've 
got to be *both* unencoded and properly named. The solution for both 
small caps and ligatures is to put them in unencoded slots, and then, 
for MUFI compliance, to put references in the MUFI PUA slots. It's a 
little kludgy (since ligatures are in the font twice), it makes the font 
just a bit bigger, but it works.

Peter