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I'm searching this PDF (84 pages) for the word 'software', which appears regularly – but neither Safari or Preview can find it.

If I search for 'soft' it finds instances like "VISSOFT', which is right next to the word 'Software' that it doesn't find. I'm interested to know:

Am I going mad? Is this a replicable problem? (I'm Running on Lion) What can I do about it?

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up vote 2 down vote accepted

It breaks because the "ft" in "Software" is embedded as a ligature between the letters, not as the individual letters. This obviously is a sign of high quality typography, but the readers don't support it when searching.

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When you select and copy the word from the PDF, you actually get "So_ware", which you can then paste into the search field to finally get your results.

enter image description here

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Nice... fooled by that beautiful lettering! –  Joe Feb 6 '12 at 10:52
How did you create the ft ligature example? –  Daniel Beck Feb 6 '12 at 11:23
Wikipedia did ;) @dan –  slhck Feb 6 '12 at 11:47
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