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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)TR
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2 yr. ago

  • My wife and I had booked a hotel with "shower en suite". We assumed that this meant that the hotel rooms bathroom had a shower instead e.g. a tub.

    Nope. In the middle of the room, there was a plastic booth not unlike those portable toilets you can find at festivals. This was the shower. You had to drop in coins to get warm water in the shower.

    There was no bathroom as such. A common toilet was half the stairs down from the room, and it ran out of toilet paper on the weekend.

    The breakfast was rather spartan, a lot of "either this or that, but not both" selections.

    This was very emberrasing for our friends who had recommended that place (and helped us with a roll of toilet paper). They had been in that hotel some 30 or 40 years before, when it still had style...

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Books

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  • I am lucky that I have learned to deal with the issues. One key issue is face blindness. I am completely unable to read faces, and it is extremely difficult to identify someone by just their faces.

  • Books

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  • I indeed have a faster reading speed. I intentionally switched to English for reading (not my native language) to slow down the reading speed.

    But I rarely read novellas or plays - I prefer proper books. When I was a kid, of course I read childrens books which were absolute quickies. But I did not include them in my count.

    I can easily read The Lord of the Rings between lunch and dinner, and still enjoy Tolkiens play with languages, or tell you where to find a specific scene.