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Damian Been
Participant
October 30, 2020
Question

Unwanted Ligature symbols when copying from Acrobat to Word

  • October 30, 2020
  • 3 replies
  • 3753 views

 I've been working on a PDF version of an online magazine, where I'm just exporting the webpages to PDF and framing those PDFs in an Indesign document.

Everything looks fine in the Indesign document and when I export it to PDF everything looks fine in Acrobat too, but when I copy parts of the text from the PDF to a word document the fi, fl, fr, etc. get changed into !, ", etc. (check added files)

 

I've been struggling with this for a while now, but I cant seem to find an easy fix for it, since I'm not using text boxes.

Hopefully someone knows a good solution.

This topic has been closed for replies.

3 replies

T
Test Screen Name
Legend
October 30, 2020

If you don't seem to be able to turn off Ligatures in InDesign I suggest you post in the InDesign forum. If you can stop them getting into the PDF the issue shouldn't arise.

T
Test Screen Name
Legend
October 30, 2020

Or, perhaps you can turn off ligatures in InDesign, if you don't want them in the PDF.

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Damian BeenAuthor
Participant
October 30, 2020

Is there a way of doing that without text boxes? I made the mistake of just importing a PDF print of the website, without copy pasting any text into Indesign, so I don't have much creative freedom with those.

 

I'm now copy pasting all the text into text boxes. It's tedious work, but that seems to work. I hoped there might be another solution for it

T
Test Screen Name
Legend
October 30, 2020

I'm not sure I see the connection with a PDF print of a website versus InDesign. Can you describe your workflow more. Something is clearly wrong in the PDF because ligatures should work better than that, but printing to PDF is likely to mess things comprehensively up.

hammer0909
Community Expert
hammer0909Community Expert
Community Expert
October 30, 2020

Ligatures are typically a feature of the font that you're using. Usually an OpenType font. If you're copying text from Acrobat and pasting into Word and the Word doc is not using an OpenType font, there's no character that can be used to recognize the ligature. I'd try choosing an OpenType font in Word before pasting the text. I'd also ask the question why you're going from InDesign to PDF to Word. Why not go directly from InDesign to Word? A lot of conversion occurs when the PDF is generated and some features will be lost.

D
Damian BeenAuthor
Participant
October 30, 2020

Hmm I've tried for a while, but that doesn't seem to work sadly.

Problem is that I have to send a PDF to this company I'm working with. They apparently have a very strict way of doing things, so they have to copy from PDF to Word.

 

Thank you!

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