“For our profits, it is reasonable not to waste money on AC.” – Your boss

Well, this would be more calling the cops on the DoorDash driver.

The compressing and renumbering seems to be more common with embedded Chinese fonts - Space-wise it makes a lot of sense. But yes, mark and copy text, paste it into word or writer, and you get gibberish. Can’t verify the search, though. And, of course, Google translate can’t do anything with it, either.

If you ever need to edit a PDF that way, just use Inkscape. It is way better than LO draw for that.

It is not a curse. It does exactly what it is intended to do: Create an archive of a document that is universally reproduceable.

It is a very well designed cul-de-sac for exactly this purpose. Using it for anything else is calling for trouble.

The problem lies in the PDFs themselves. In there are objects that represent lines of glyphs. If you are lucky. A conversion tool can guess which of those lines belong together and produce the text.

It cannot know any intentions behind it, though. Take a numbered list. The first line is two line objects: the number plus the . or the ), and the first line of text. The conversion tool can now guess. As the line blocks with the numbers are all left of the line blocks with text, this could be a numbered list. Or it could be a table with two columns. Nothing in the PDF is giving any hints.

And that is the easy part. This assumes that the document either uses default fonts, or keeps its embedded fonts untouched. If they use embedded fonts and a PDF optimizer that only embeds the used characters and renumbers them, any copy or conversion tool is bound to fail.

Same with protected PDFs where you simply cannot copy the text from the start.

And then there are PDFs that just consist of scanned pages. Here you would need an OCR software to get something readable out of them.

PDF is an archival, output format, the end of a process. Not something to work from.

Always preserve the original file. Keep it safe. If you change tools, make sure you have a conversion path into something editable. The PDF is for giving away, nothing else.

And then sue them to kingdom come.

I had to design a volume-limiting system for one of our devices that uses headphones. We know that the users turn the volume up to unhealthy levels - more often than not because their hearing is already damaged from listening for years or decades to systems that had no limitation. They are still able to turn the volume up with the (analog) amplifier, but we measure the signal, and if it exceeds the legal limit, we scale it down digitally.

They had no Linux driver back then at all, but there were some rudimentary from the community that printed Ok. They just did not support special printing modes, which i wanted to add.

I contacted both technical support for commercial systems and later their booth on a big technical trade fair (CeBit Hannover), and got basically the same opinion both times. The first was definitely no “Sales Rep”, and the people at the booth were a manager and an engineer.

But I agree, their opinion is stupid.

Canon is on my personal blacklist for decades. I bought a printer from them, not just a normal A4/legal, but a professional, wide one that uses rolls of paper, etc. I was unhappy with the state of the driver under Linux, so I called and asked for a programming documentation to write my own printer driver. Their opinion on Linux/open source was that “open source is theft of intellectual property”.

I got a login on an IBM system. I logged in and moved to the change password mask. Changed my password to something filling out the 12 character new password field. Logged out, and got the login mask again. With an eight character password field.

Thank goodness this is illegal in my country.

Have you ever seen how long it takes for a tree to grow?

Well, AIX (one of IBMs UNIX variants) is old, and, AFAIK more or less legacy stuff. The other is RHEL, which is s Linux.

Windows? On a mainframe? Microsoft may be ambicious, but that is a few number to big for them.

For closed and proprietary stuff, and things that still run on FORTRAN and COBOL, yes. But about anything running a web frontend, it’s Linux (RHEL).

Guess what most IBM big irons are running nowadays?

I once bought a 12V, Dremel like drill kit. One of the thin (1mm) drills was broken. They send me a new set.

That kind of fuckery drove me off a company-sponsored training course.