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opening PDF ligaturs added?


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When I open a pdf all goes pretty well except that words that start with a "fi" combination the F gets changed in a Ł (L-stroke)Ł. I cannot use search nd replace becaus in the search function I cannot enter that character. Someone has an idea how to solve this?

 

T.i.a.

 

Hans

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Well, is your computer in any way set up to use the Polish language?

On which computer was the pdf produced and with which software please?

The thing is, the letter combinations fi and fl have a special history both in typesetting going back centuries (with metal type) and more recently with computer typesetting.

Historically the reason is that the top of a letter f often overhung the metal shank of the piece of metal type, so that it fitted over a smaller letter, as in fa, fe, fo, and so on, but with fi the top of the f might hit the dot of the letter i in the sequence fi (or would look ugly) and the top of the f might hit the lowercase letter l in the sequence fl. So with metal type, separate pieces of type for fi and fl were often included in fonts, also ff, ffi and ffl.

This effect has been attempted to be used in displays in computer typesetting in various ways, more often for just fi and fl than for the others. This has been by way of some strange encodings of some characters, such as having a special character for fi and a special character for fl in some cases. So the effect you are noticing might be something to do with that.

I do not know the whole answer but maybe a discussion with various participants can take place please.

William

 

 

 

 

Until December 2022, using a Lenovo laptop running Windows 10 in England. From January 2023, using an HP laptop running Windows 11 in England.

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1 hour ago, William Overington said:

Well, is your computer in any way set up to use the Polish language?

On which computer was the pdf produced and with which software please?

The thing is, the letter combinations fi and fl have a special history both in typesetting going back centuries (with metal type) and more recently with computer typesetting.

Historically the reason is that the top of a letter f often overhung the metal shank of the piece of metal type, so that it fitted over a smaller letter, as in fa, fe, fo, and so on, but with fi the top of the f might hit the dot of the letter i in the sequence fi (or would look ugly) and the top of the f might hit the lowercase letter l in the sequence fl. So with metal type, separate pieces of type for fi and fl were often included in fonts, also ff, ffi and ffl.

This effect has been attempted to be used in displays in computer typesetting in various ways, more often for just fi and fl than for the others. This has been by way of some strange encodings of some characters, such as having a special character for fi and a special character for fl in some cases. So the effect you are noticing might be something to do with that.

I do not know the whole answer but maybe a discussion with various participants can take place please.

William

 

 

 

 

Hi William,

 

Polish? No :) . The book was written in Italian in the Mellel word processor on a Mac. Font Cambria. From there I exported as a Pdf. In Mellel and the PDF the letter combination is as it should be f + i. When I open the PDF in AP I get the stroked L and an i with a tracking of -237 0/00 (so they are overlapping in AP. When I activate unicode I get EG+0151 in stead of the stroked L. Seems to me the translation goes wrong from pdf to AP.

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Thank you.

I wondered about Polish because the L with a stroke character is used in Polish and I was wondering if was an old "code page" issue where the characters from hexadecimal 08 to FF had been used for Polish, though on further thought it would have been a page for Central European languages rather than Polish specifically.

I have only ever used a Mac on a desktop publishing course in 1997.

William

 

Until December 2022, using a Lenovo laptop running Windows 10 in England. From January 2023, using an HP laptop running Windows 11 in England.

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3 hours ago, KnikmanAV said:

Seems to me the translation goes wrong from pdf to AP.

That is one possibility.

However, there is another possibility.

This is that the fi might be displaying properly in the PDF reader, but that does not necessarily mean that the code points for the f and the I are accessible from the PDF by any software at all as the information may not be there.

A simple test might be helpful.

Can you copy from the PDF a sentence with an fi ligature in it please and paste into WordPad (not NotePad, I do not know if that will work) on a Windows machine and then clear the clipboard by copying something else from somewhere, then copying from WordPad and pasting in this thread please.

If so, I can then search for the code point in FontCreator so as to find out what we have. Also we can note whether an f and an I appear or just one character or nothing at all.

If you do not have access to a Windows computer maybe you could use some other application, a basic application - maybe somebody reading this forum who knows about Mac computers could advise please. 

William

 

 

Until December 2022, using a Lenovo laptop running Windows 10 in England. From January 2023, using an HP laptop running Windows 11 in England.

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6 hours ago, William Overington said:

That is one possibility.

However, there is another possibility.

This is that the fi might be displaying properly in the PDF reader, but that does not necessarily mean that the code points for the f and the I are accessible from the PDF by any software at all as the information may not be there.

A simple test might be helpful.

Can you copy from the PDF a sentence with an fi ligature in it please and paste into WordPad (not NotePad, I do not know if that will work) on a Windows machine and then clear the clipboard by copying something else from somewhere, then copying from WordPad and pasting in this thread please.

If so, I can then search for the code point in FontCreator so as to find out what we have. Also we can note whether an f and an I appear or just one character or nothing at all.

If you do not have access to a Windows computer maybe you could use some other application, a basic application - maybe somebody reading this forum who knows about Mac computers could advise please. 

William

 

 

problem solved. The word processor was set up to use simple ligatures, carried that over to the PDF, etc.

Thanks for pointing in the right direction William

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