[TipVFL]

This reminds of an eBook of Neuromancer that I read, it was occasionally missing the letter f. For the most part I just added it back mentally without really thinking about it, but then sometimes I hit a passage like this: "He turned, pulled his jacket on, and licked the cobra to full extension." That one took a moment.

[jobigoud]

Probably the original text was using ligatures for fi and fl and they got lost in conversion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typographic_ligature#Stylistic...

[superkuh]

Yup. I have to manually detect and correct for all the possible ligatures in all possible unicode in my text to speech pre-processor scripts. I hate them.

[reaperducer]

I wonder if at some point your e-book went through macOS's Preview program.

At work I sometimes have to copy blocks of text from a PDF into another document. If I do it with Preview, I lose the fi and fl ligatures. It only happens with PDFs created in-house, so I guess it's some kind of stylistic thing that comes from the guy who lays out the PDFs.

I eventually learned to use Adobe's own Acrobat, instead, and it works fine.

[azinman2]

Please send to bugreport.apple.com

[lmitchell]

Not gonna lie, I still can't parse what this is supposed to be after a number of readings. What's the actual sentence? I'm so curious :P

[LarryL]

> licked the cobra to full extension

should be

> flicked the cobra to full extension

The cobra is a weapon in the Neuromancer's universe, something like an extendable knife/club.