Is it possible to remove ligatures from copied text?

Question

I have a few PDFs that contain ligatures in the text (e.g., ff is combined into a single character, ff).

Is there an easy way to remove them when copying the text from the PDF? (i.e., when I paste, I'd like the ff to be pasted as ff).

I copy a lot of text from these PDFs into answers on Stack Overflow and I find the ligatures at best obnoxious (ok, I admit, I'm really picky :-P); the ligatures also do not show up correctly when copied into other places (e.g., if I copy them into Notepad, they show up as blocks).

I cannot modify the PDFs.

I use both Adobe Acrobat Reader and Foxit Reader, but I'd be open to trying a new PDF reader.

Answer 1

This answer is courtesy of the LaTeX Community. It's solved the issue for me.

\usepackage{microtype}
\DisableLigatures{encoding = *, family = * }

Answer 2

One possibility would be to use your favorite text-editor and simply replace them.

Another way would be to write a script which utilizes sed...but that would be *NIX-Systems only, I fear.

Answer 3

In python this would be:

import unicodedata
# \uFB00 is the ff ligature.
unicodedata.normalize('NFKD',u'\uFB00').encode('ascii','ignore')

You could combine this with pyPdf to read the pdf files.

Answer 4

The reader evince seems to decode ligatures when I tested this.

Btw. for pdflatex documents you can use this in the preamble to display ligatures in the PDF document but copy individual characters:

\input{glyphtounicode.tex}
\pdfgentounicode=1 %