[Tex/LaTex] Can we make ligatures copy-and-pastable?

Question

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What are good ways to make pdflatex output copy-and-pasteable?

(6 answers)

Closed 8 years ago.

Is there a straightforward way to make ligatures more copy-and-pastable? I know that by using

\usepackage[t1]{fontenc}

that many glyphs like accented and umlauted characters become copy-and-pastable from a pdf.

But, for example, the word "five" is typeset with an "fi" ligature (a merging of the two letters into one) and I'm unable to copy this word from the pdf and paste into a text editor. The fontenc package doesn't seem to help with this.

Here is my MWE of the issue. I am using Adobe Reader X to read, and Windows with TeXnikCenter.

\documentclass[12pt]{article}

\begin{document}
five

\end{document}

I have tested and cannot successfully paste into TeXnicCenter, MS Word, or the Firefox address bar.

Answer 1

In general, to enable copy/paste from pdftex-generated PDF,

\input{glyphtounicode}
\pdfgentounicode=1

should be used.