[BRLTTY] reading DPF files with BRLTTY: character conversion

[Jason White]

I've noticed that when the version of pdftotext from poppler-utils is used, or
pdftohtml is used (which also depends on Poppler), certain sequences of
letters are often represented as single characters in the output. This is due
to kerning and ligatures in the typesetting, which result in the use of
special glyphs in the font.

To read such files with BRLTTY, is there a tool which can expand these
characters into the appropriate letter sequences?

Someone mentioned to me that iconv should be able to do this, but I haven't
been able to find the right options. The input would be a text file produced
by pdftotext, and the output a text file with the characters correctly
represented as letters.

Alternatively, I suppose BRLTTY could be made to do this, given suitable
tables; but I would rather convert the text files themselves, to aid in
searching.