The Lurking Ligature

I ran into another horror on the road to making texts instantly available. In typography, a ligature is a special character made by joining two letters. For example, æ. There are also ligatures for prettifying text. There's an fl ligature, which won't render in Blogger, so I can't show it in this sentence. There's an Adobe PDF editor that includes ligatures as an option when you save a document. It will convert the fl's in the document into the special fl character, with the tops of the f and l connected, like the fl in 'reflections' from this book:

Yet another anomaly confusing machines, and people searching for 'reflections', although I expect Windows and Google handle ligatures automatically. Something to consider if you author PDF docs, and want your doc to be find-able.