sureshrps:

What exactly are you having trouble with? You've been here long enough to know that you should ask a question with enough supporting information. Please review the following for future posts: Ask questions the smart way, I know what I mean. Why don't you? and How (Not) To Ask A Question.

So what code are you having problems with? If it's actually a cut & paste question, then you should direct it to the help group for the OS you're using, or perhaps a PDF support group.

If you have a text file and need to modify it, then I'd suggest making a table-based program to search for problem data and replace it with the data you want. Then, as you find the ligatures, enter the appropriate data in your table and stuff your file through the program.

...roboticus

When your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like your thumb.

You should consider exporting to a textfile and doing the replacement there. (see Parsing PDFs by text position?)

Or to run a little script on the pasted text.

E.g. with emacs you could run a hook on every insert, which could do the transformation.

Or maybe ... did you check if your pdf reader allows to run hooks on copies... ?

> and impossible to know what letters it should be.

I doubt this could you give us some examples?

hmpf ... a little googling shows older discussions http://forum.planetpdf.com/wb/default.asp?action=9&read=62886&fid=6 with different approaches, including pdf-readers like evince which convert on copy.

Cheers Rolf

It's a symbol that represents a combination of letters. You can still recognize the original letters, but they're drawn slightly differently. examples

In PDF, these ligatures are commonly represented by a single replacement character. Thus, if you copy/paste text from a PDF file, you usually get a bogus character code that isn't used for anything else in that document. In doesn't even have to be the same character code in different PDF files...