Saving a PDF as a Word doc ligature issue

I was glad I found the question, not so glad that it wasn't answered. I am using Acrobat 11 Pro. I have had this issue when saving as Word doc and docx. I've used Office 10, 13, 16 and now 365 - and the problem persists. I transcribe braille - and pdfs sent by my clients need to be saved as word docs for me to do the coding for the braille software. In many, but oddly not all, of the docs, words such as "benefits" and "find" will come through as only "fi" with a tab afterwards. Hopefully this comment will bump this question up where it'll be seen.