[XeTeX] Ligatures and searching in PDFs

[Khaled Hosny]

On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 04:26:11AM +0200, Janusz S. Bień wrote:
> On Mon, 10 May 2010  "David J. Perry" <hospes.primus at verizon.net> wrote:
> 
> >>
> >> The proper solution would be to use /ActualText feature of the PDF
> >> specification.
> >
> > I am very interested in this issue of searching PDFs.  A google search for 
> > "PDF Actual Text" turned up nothing.  I then downloaded the actual PDF spec 
> > from the Adobe web site and found the reference, and got the idea of what 
> > it's about.  But how do people like me who use commonly available tools such 
> > as XeLaTeX to make PDFs implement this? Could you say a little more about 
> > this feature or provide pointers to some information?
> 
> Unfortunately this is just a wishlist. The access to the feature in
> XeLaTeX and other open source tools is yet to be designed and
> implemented.

IIRC, there are already latex packages that adds higher level support
for ActualText tags (low level support is already in the engines). Also
libpoppler based PDF viewers are fine copying such text.

Regards,
 Khaled

-- 
 Khaled Hosny
 Arabic localiser and member of Arabeyes.org team
 Free font developer