Note by @fastfinge

Matt Campbell @matt@toot.cafe

1mo

PDFium is best known as the PDF renderer in Chrome. But apparently it can also generate PDFs. I recently came across a PDF whose metadata says it was produced by PDFium. How does that actually happen in practice? Did someone print something to a PDF? This one's frustrating because the content of the PDF is all vector graphics. Even the text is rendered as vector graphics. Like, this document was machine-readable text at some point. How did that get fucked up?

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Matt Campbell @matt@toot.cafe

1mo

Yeah, I know, nobody cares about accessibility. It's depressing and not very constructive to dwell on that. What I want to know is, what technical decisions led to this document being fucked up in this way?

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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

1mo

@matt One thing I find is that as the general public becomes more and more removed from how computers work, accessibility gets worse. Today’s interfaces completely hide the file manager from you, never mind just hiding file extensions. And as interfaces become more polished, I’m finding people have much less understanding of the difference between text and a picture of text. Especially as stuff like AI copy text features blur the difference even more for people. When they’re not being shown file extensions, file sizes, or often the filesystem at all, how does a non-technical person easily and quickly tell if they’re dealing with text or an image of text?

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James Scholes @jscholes@dragonscave.space

1mo

@fastfinge See also: the person who downloaded a Microsoft Word document, printed it out, wrote on it, and then took a picture of it on a smartphone. @matt

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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

1mo

@jscholes @matt And with all the bloated markup, fonts, and so on included in modern Microsoft Word documents, I bet the picture wasn’t even that much larger a file than the original document!

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