FWIW, I don't see how adding "ff" and the like to the OT fonts simply as independent glyphs for rendering, not related to any OT or Unicode ligature mechanism, could confuse anything. I agree the real bug is in poppler (and/or Debian's choice of using these OT fonts without sufficient testing), but on the other hand, GUST foundry has always tried hard to work with the world as it is, rather than how it should be. karl