On: What's so hard about PDF text extraction?

[ivan_ah]

In case this helps, here is a mapping from Unicode ligature-->ascii for all the ligatures I know of (the ones supported by LaTeX fonts): https://github.com/ivanistheone/arXivLDA/blob/master/preproc...

This is assuming you cleaning up the output of `pdftotext` which in my experience is the best command line tool for extracting plain text.