In both Publisher v2 and v2.0.3, exporting a document to PDF consistently does not handle ligatures, or single or double quotes correctly. Turning off ligatures for the text box and paragraph style is possible, so that is not an issue for me.
HOWEVER, the fact that you do not export either single or double quotes correctly is a MAJOR problem. I have checked the PDF using 3 viewers, they all consistently show the same, incorrect PDF results. Thus, it is NOT my PDF viewer (Mac OS Preview) or others (Adobe Acrobat Reader). Again, text shows as intended within Publisher, resulting PDF output is wrong.
For reference, the font being used is "PT Sans". Again, I have also attempted to turn off ligatures for the text section, which did fix the problem with every instances of "F" followed by "I" that is an "fi" as in "five" etc. displaying incorrectly. So this is also a problem, but not significant for me.
Mac OS version is MacOS 12.6.1 on a Mac Studio.
FIRST Screenshot of text within Publisher, showing correct.
NOW Screenshot of PDF result, with all double quotes changed to single quote, single quotes missing, apostrophe missing, etc.