Letters Missing From PDF

Having trouble with letters missing from your pdf content when you copy it to web? I noticed this issue before which I at first thought to be a corrupted PDF, but the PDF itself retained the information.

Letters Missing From PDF – Details

As it turns out, when you create a PDF with some 3rd party tools, there can be something that gets embedded in place of the regular characters called ligatures. Now, these ligatures are single character representations of a 2 character entity. Such examples include the Amperstand originally anyways, ff, fi, and several others.

As I understand it, there is no direct way to fix this except where you want to copy and paste, then replace on a byte by byte value, the characters that are messed up. This, however, can be full of pitfalls. The proper thing to do is to re-export and check your settings although this is not always possible. I have tried using evince, foxit, and other readers to see if this fixes the issue, however my current pdf contains embedded fonts.