Ligature handling for PDF searching.

[Brooks Moses <bmoses@stanford.edu>]

(This came up on comp.text.tex in a question about LaTeX, but it also 
applies to ConTeXt, and the proposed solution for LaTeX doesn't apply.)

Consider the following document:

   \starttext
   Some ligature tests: ff, fi, ffi, fl, ffl.
   \stoptext

If I process that with texexex -pdf, load it into Acrobat 5, and then 
copy-and-paste the text from the PDF into a text editor, the fi and fl 
ligatures are correctly treated as two letters, but the ff, ffi, and ffl 
ligatures are treated as single (unknown) characters.  Similarly, searching 
for "f" within the document only finds the fi and fl ligatures; it doesn't 
find the others.  Searching for "ff" finds nothing.

This is a fairly significant problem in the on-screen usability of 
ConTeXt-created documents.

In LaTeX, there is apparently a solution in the cmap.sty package (though it 
currently only works for T1 encoding):
   http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/cmap/

Is there a similar solution for ConTeXt?  (Has this perhaps been solved 
with a later version of ConTeXt than I have on my computer?)

Thanks,
- Brooks