PDF Highlight Reference Rendering and Export

Questions & Help
1

So, whenever I put a PDF highlight reference in a block, ti is rendered as 2 and tt is rendered as ‘. An example is below.

image
image1198×256 40.7 KB

I tried changing the default font and messing with the CSS with no success. Here’s what I added to CSS

.pdf-highlight,
.pdf-annotation,
span[data-ref] {
  font-family: "Noto Sans", "DejaVu Sans", sans-serif !important;
}

:root {
  --ls-font-family: "Roboto", Arial, sans-serif;
}

Any ideas what’s going on?

2

The PDF viewer needs some developer love.

Ligatures (ae, oe, ue, ff, fi, fl, ffi, ffl, ti, tl are the most common ones) are separate glyphs (drawings) in most fonts that look better than the juxtaposed individual charcaters. In this day and age, a decent Opentype font will automagically map the above two- and three-character sequences to a prettier combined glyph, i.e., the corresponding ligature, so instead of “a‌‌e” you will see “æ”.

In the bad old days, the application had to do that, and Adobe Acrobat would do that by creating a table that maps glyphs (like your ligatures) to more “normal” character codes to make them accessible to PDF apps. Example: “2” → “æ”.

This table is stored in the PDF, but if a PDF viewer does not read that table or misinterprets it, you’ll see the “2” instead of the “æ”. There is nothing you can do about it (unless you can fix the PDF viewer).

1 Like
3

Thanks for the education. I hope this is fixed in the DB version