Brooks Moses wrote:
(This came up on comp.text.tex in a question about LaTeX, but it also applies to ConTeXt, and the proposed solution for LaTeX doesn't apply.)
Consider the following document:
\starttext Some ligature tests: ff, fi, ffi, fl, ffl. \stoptext
If I process that with texexex -pdf, load it into Acrobat 5, and then copy-and-paste the text from the PDF into a text editor, the fi and fl ligatures are correctly treated as two letters, but the ff, ffi, and ffl ligatures are treated as single (unknown) characters. Similarly, searching for "f" within the document only finds the fi and fl ligatures; it doesn't find the others. Searching for "ff" finds nothing.
This is a fairly significant problem in the on-screen usability of ConTeXt-created documents.
In LaTeX, there is apparently a solution in the cmap.sty package (though it currently only works for T1 encoding): http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/cmap/
Is there a similar solution for ConTeXt? (Has this perhaps been solved with a later version of ConTeXt than I have on my computer?)
Yes, but IFAIK only for one or two encodings (CMAP files). I have to remember ... the keyword is \usepdffontresource. See source enco-pfr.tex for more info. vit