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!
I 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.
With the aggressive push of LLMs and Generative AI ..i am expecting a lot of OCR features to become "smarter" by default, namely go beyond mechanical OCR and start inserting hallucinations and sematically/contextually "more correct" information in OCR output
It's not hard to imagine some powerful LLMs being able to undo some light redactions that are deducible based on context
pottertheotter|2 months ago
2ICofafireteam|2 months ago
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.
eviks|2 months ago
8note|2 months ago
albert_e|2 months ago
It's not hard to imagine some powerful LLMs being able to undo some light redactions that are deducible based on context