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This made me think of something I came across recently that’s almost the opposite problem of requiring PDFs to be searchable. A local government would publish P
by pottertheotter 9mo ago
This made me think of something I came across recently that’s almost the opposite problem of requiring PDFs to be searchable. A local government would publish PDFs where the text is clearly readable on screen, but the selectable text layer is intentionally scrambled, so copy/paste or search returns garbage. It's a very hostile thing to do, especially with public data!
- eviks 9mo agoHostile indeed, and also happens in user-facing documents like product manuals!
- 2ICofafireteam 9mo agoI have encountered PDFs that would exhibit this behavior in one browser but not in another. One fun thing I encountered from local government is releasing files with potato quality resolution and not considering the page size. I had a FOI request that returned mainly Arch D sized drawings but they were in a 94 DPI PDF rendered as letter sized. It was a fun conversation trying to explain to an annoyed city employee that putting those large drawings in a 94 DPI letter size page effectively made it 30-ish DPI.