Ligature characters (fi/fl/ffi) are dropped instead of expanded when extracting PDF text

Summary

When converting a PDF that uses typographic ligatures (fi, fl, ffi, etc.), anydoc drops the ligature glyph entirely instead of expanding it to its constituent letters. This silently corrupts words in the output.

Repro

npx -y @firecrawl/anydoc "EU AI-Act-overview-30-May-2024.pdf" -o out.md

Source PDF: https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/high-level-summary/ (also mirrored at futureoflife.org)

Observed

Expected	anydoc output
classifies	classi es
affected	a ected
influence	in uence
profiling	pro ling
identification	identi cation
traffic	traf c

Reproduced consistently across the document (7+ occurrences), always at an fi/fl/ffi ligature boundary.

Expected behavior

The ligature glyph should be expanded to its plain-text equivalent (e.g. "fi" glyph → "fi"), not dropped. For comparison, a separate OCR pipeline (pdftotext-based) on the same PDF preserves these correctly, either as the literal Unicode ligature codepoint (fi, fl) or as decomposed ASCII — either of which renders/reads correctly, unlike anydoc's current output which deletes the letters.

Environment

• @firecrawl/anydoc version: 0.2.4
• Invocation: CLI, no --ocr flag (native PDF text extraction path — same result with --ocr hosted, since this PDF doesn't need OCR)
• OS: macOS