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Section 41.3 Font Notes

Subsection 41.3.1 Ligatures and a Searchable PDF

Many fonts combine certain letter pairs—such as “fi” or “fl”—into a single ligature glyph. This looks good, but a search of the resulting PDF may then fail to find a word that contains the pair, and copying such a word out of the PDF can drop or garble those characters. The Publisher FAQ (Chapter 46) has a related note titled “Searching my PDF output is broken”. If you adopt a custom font and notice that search or copy-and-paste has stopped working, its ligatures are the likely cause.
The remedy is to control the ligature features through fontspec. Mitch Keller reported that, using Palatino for Active Calculus and Applied Combinatorics, changing the font declaration to
\defaultfontfeatures{Ligatures=TeX,Mapping=tex-text}
restored both searching and copying. More generally, the Ligatures option, together with the liga and dlig features listed earlier, lets you trade the ligature glyphs for reliably searchable text.

Subsection 41.3.2 Dyslexic Font

There is an OTF font, with an open license, that purports to help readers with dyslexia.
  • Website is opendyslexic.org/.
  • In Debian/Ubuntu it is available in a package called fonts-opendyslexic.
  • When used with xelatex the relevant names of the font are OpenDyslexic and OpenDyslexicMono.
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