It's not a ligature, but you're definitely onto something. I checked again, and all the characters of my name are individual paths, except for the f's. I put a

It's not a ligature, but you're definitely onto something. I checked again, and all the characters of my name are individual paths, except for the f's. I put a space between the f's, and now they're two separate characters as well. I double an n, no grouping. I put in a double f elsewhere, the grouping happens for those. It's amazing to me that the PDF ecosystem is this broken after thirty years. I'm boggled that there isn't a commonly-used way to add structured data to a PDF to enable it as a machine-communication standard as well as a human one. Edit to add: I found a "disable ligatures" option in Pages. Setting that didn't fix the "f" grouping. :-/