3 ms·
> 10% of the glyphs were scrambled ("lik3 thZs"), like some sort of character table corruption. As I understand it, that's a form copy protection trying to pre
by inetknght 6y ago
> 10% of the glyphs were scrambled ("lik3 thZs"), like some sort of character table corruption.
As I understand it, that's a form copy protection trying to prevent exactly what you're doing.
- crazygringo 6y agoWhile that type of copy-protection does exist in rare instances, in this case it wasn't -- it was with any normal webpage printed to PDF. It was a straight-up bug, I tried to file it with Chromium in fact [1], but it turned out to be a macOS issue that Big Sur fixed. [1] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1128490 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=112849...
- Someone 6y agoMore likely it’s the effect of font subsetting. If you want your PDF to render the same everywhere, you have to embed font information (even if that font is something like Arial, which is available almost everywhere, as ‘almost everywhere’ isn’t ‘everywhere’, and because there are zillions of variations on Arial) You don’t want to embed entire fonts, though, certainly not if a PDF uses only a few characters of a font. The memory wise cheapest way of embedding a font leaves out the table that maps glyph numbers back to Unicode code points. If you do that, the PDF reader guesses a 1:1 mapping to ascii/Unicode. Subletting means you can’t extract all glyphs in a font from a single file, but AFAIK, that’s just a side effect. I guess this bug drops such a table, or messes up that translation table.
- m463 6y agoTry to screenshot with a movie onscreen. You get a grey rectangle.