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> a bug that corrupts some PDF documents shared via Dropbox if they contain Japanese text That's really disturbing. Is Dropbox not just moving bytes around? Wh

• veidr 11y ago
  Sorry, I should have been more clear -- that sounds worse than it is (although it is still bad). The original file data in the Dropbox is not corrupted; it is only the PDF presented in the web browser (to the user with whom you shared the data) that is corrupted. What happens is, when you share a PDF file via link, instead of presenting the actual PDF file in the browser (which would work fine) Dropbox instead presents its own PDF viewer inside the web browser and shows the file. This "PDF view" has problems with many PDF documents containing Japanese text, and either doesn't render the Japanese, or renders bogus data instead. Depending on the contents of the document, this can result in it looking like gibberish, but it can also result in a document that looks correct to the recipient but is actually totally wrong. For instance, one real-world case was a document with a long list of work items for a project. The items happened to be in English, and in Japanese many of them said 'CANCELED' （中止）in the right-hand column. The Dropbox PDF viewer failed to render only the Japanese in the right hand column, so to the recipient it looked like e.g. a list of 100 work items, when in fact the point of the document was to communicate that 60 of the 100 items had been cancelled. In this case, there was no hint at all to the recipient that there was anything amiss. It's a bad bug, and dramatically reduced the utility of Dropbox for our company. But, to be clear, the original data stored in Dropbox was not corrupted.