PDF help

[Piero]

The PDF documentation "formatting" is still horrible

Just an example: # P B _ C o m p i l e r _ P r o c e d u r e (you won't find it…)

[Quin]

PDF is a garbage format. I hate it.
The reason the text is all split like that is becausew unlike every other sane file format on the planet, PDF just tells you where characters should be rendered! Which is incredibly fun if you're a blind person trying to write a PDF reader, let me tell you.
Anyways, enough OT from me for now.

[Piero]

PDF is a garbage format. I hate it.

OMG!!! I didn't dare to even try to imagine how it can be for a blind person, if the "reading" is made on "the same results you get when you copy/paste"…

FREEEED!

[Piero]

PDF is a garbage format. I hate it.

Dear Quin, you made me remember that LONG time ago I worked a LOT with PDFs…
It was good and extremely bad at the same time…
Extremely bad:
We had to Print, but the PDFs that customers sent us were often THE WORST NIGHTMARE YOU CAN IMAGINE.
We used a "plugin" called Pitstop (seems it still exists) and another I cannot remember now, but let's call it "ColorFixer"… and did miracles
Good:
When I went to "other printing places", after showing Pitstop and "ColorFixer" to the poor printing ppl, they looked at me like if I had just discovered fire and they had to throw rose petals for me to step on

I'm out of that since long ago, but I hoped/thought that in 2025 a FREEWARE thing to fix PDFs, or to "digitally print" them decently, existed…
I don't want to search for it; it would make me vividly remember the old nightmare PDFs

FREEEED!

[Piero]

I would be very curious to know exactly what "Fred" used to "compose" the PDF help.
Possibly with "a downloadable example file" for that program, like "page 293" (294): "UserGuide - Constants"…
Try copy/paste that… and what are those ?? indents?

I'm hoping it to be easily fixable, or exportable to a better free program… (Apple Pages? Calibre? Libre Office? AsciidocFX?) …ON MAC!

[Piero]

Grrr… I was 99% sure it was a "font not embedded" problem, but seems it's not!
Wish I also had HomeBrew and shell on Mac when I was working with PDFs…:

Code: Select all

#> pdffonts PureBasic.pdf

name                                           type              emb sub uni prob object ID
---------------------------------------------- ----------------- --- --- --- ---- ---------
GNFPVM+SFRM1200                                Type 1            yes yes no         7989  0
PBYRSZ+SFRM1728                                Type 1            yes yes no         7988  0
MHZLCJ+SFRM2074                                Type 1            yes yes no         7987  0
DMKPXF+SFRM1000                                Type 1            yes yes no         8024  0
SSMGZN+SFBX2488                                Type 1            yes yes no         8021  0
VPXGYX+SFBX1200                                Type 1            yes yes no         8022  0
ETYKLU+SFBX1000                                Type 1            yes yes no         8023  0
XFEHME+SFBX2074                                Type 1            yes yes no        10147  0
ZOQJMF+SFTT1000                                Type 1            yes yes no        10159  0
KRHULS+CMSY10                                  Type 1            yes yes no   X    10278  0
SUBKLU+SFIT1000                                Type 1            yes yes no        12933  0
VNHPZN+CMSY7                                   Type 1            yes yes no   X    16207  0
LKVDUG+SFBX1440                                Type 1            yes yes no        20183  0
RKHEPQ+CMR7                                    Type 1            yes yes no   X    47159  0
ZLBWQW+CMSY8                                   Type 1            yes yes no   X    52920  0

I don't want to install adobe acrobat to double-check… it seems to be a weird Latex/Unicode problem…
At least TRY to EXPORT (or print…) to PDF on a Mac!

PS: just for fun, I exported all pages to jpg and then OCRed them back to a PDF (wasn't freeware; freeware gave worse results…)
I lost "internal links/bookmarks", but on new PDF searching/copying is "better"…

PPS:

Code: Select all

       uni    "yes" if there is an explicit "ToUnicode" map in the PDF file
              (the absence of a ToUnicode map doesn't necessarily mean that
              the text can't be converted to Unicode)

       prob   "X" if this font is likely to be problematic when converting
              text to Unicode

ALSO TRY CHANGE FONTS TO STANDARD (WEB) ONES!

PPPS:
Thanks! While criticizing you, I learnted nu sh*t!

[Piero]

IMPORTANT NOTE
The paid thing I used to OCR images uses a FREEWARE, OPENSOURCE OCR engine: https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract

The freeware one was Apple Vision