|
I just got an email with a "gift" from Greenpeace, which I once supported.*
The gift is a downloadable sheet that they call a "veggie atlas" which lists which veggie foods are good sources for iron, calcium, zinc and protein.**
Sounds nice and I guess it is...
Except that it doesn't list calcium and zinc, but calci□□ and z□nc 
At a quick glance I found six squares on the sheet, two which are in the logo for this particular goal "Less meat □□re life" and I don't even know what to make of □□re 
You might argue that I'm missing a font or some such, but this is PDF!
It's Dutch so this may have been sent to tens of thousands of supporters, but of course I don't know what the international versions look like.
How did this ever get through QA or how did the person creating this not notice it?
It's quite obvious...
* I don't support everything they do either, so you don't have to tell me they're criminal or that global warming is a hoax, this post is not about that.
** Yes, we should all eat meat because it's natural and you're very insecure about your masculinity if you don't vent your love for meat on the internet, also, this post is not about that.
|
|
|
|
|
"
How did this ever get through QA or how did the person creating this not notice it?
It worked great on their Apples
|
|
|
|
|
RugbyLeague wrote: It worked great on their Apples
and their oranges, too.
It's much easier to enjoy the favor of both friend and foe, and not give a damn who's who. -- Lon Milo DuQuette
|
|
|
|
|
I haven't seen an Orange computer for 30+ years. They were of the luggable kind, weren't they? With a tiny CRT.
Nowadays it seems like Orange Computers is a consutancy company, SW house or something in that direction. They probably have nothing to do with the old Orange computers.
|
|
|
|
|
I had no idea someone actually made an "Orange" computer. I was just being silly. Who would of thunk it. 
It's much easier to enjoy the favor of both friend and foe, and not give a damn who's who. -- Lon Milo DuQuette
|
|
|
|
|
There was a Peach, too, believe it or not (One was a cheap Apple II clone, but in the UK there was also a company called Peach selling their own machines in the early 80s). Now we're just down to Apples and Raspberry Pie
|
|
|
|
|
So, if the 'i' in calcium worked, but not in zinc, then I suspect that someone replaced those letters deliberately with some special font to make the names look fancy in some way. Can't be an accident. Maybe they use a special font replacing certain characters with veggie pics and forgot to include it in the PDF. I have to admit though I'm not even sure how to add entire fonts to a PDF.
As for noticing it: as long as you check it on the same computer as the one you used to create it, you won't notice any problem. So, no, it's not obvious if you don't think to check it on a 'standard' computer.
And, yes, I've seen botched up PDFs like that before, sent by companies who you'd think should know better...
GOTOs are a bit like wire coat hangers: they tend to breed in the darkness, such that where there once were few, eventually there are many, and the program's architecture collapses beneath them. (Fran Poretto)
|
|
|
|
|
Stefan_Lang wrote: So, no, it's not obvious if you don't think to check it on a 'standard' computer.
Surely part of the job of somebody who does mail campaigns is to think to check it on other devices?
At the very least you would email it to your personal mailbox and view it on your phone.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Stefan_Lang wrote: So, no, it's not obvious if you don't think to check it on a 'standard' computer.
I thought the whole idea of PDF's was that they look the same on every computer?
Then again, I know very little about PDF as a format.
It's probably like you say and they definitely should know better
You'd expect this got sent to a couple of people for review so I guess all of them had this fancy font installed.
|
|
|
|
|
Sander Rossel wrote: You'd expect this got sent to a couple of people for review
The PDF probably started out perfect. Then it got sent to 'the boss' for review.
Now, the boss being the boss has to ensure that they find a fault - otherwise they might not be a good boss anymore. So they say, "Hey, it's almost perfect, just change a few random letters to use this awesome font that I found the other day while pretending to do real work".
Of course, it won't be the boss to blame for the mistake, and will likely get raised as a reason not to give you that pay rise you ask for at your next review: "Hey, remember that time you used that stupid font and put the reputation of the whole company into disrepute..."
"The boss effect".
|
|
|
|
|
musefan wrote: Of course, it won't be the boss to blame for the mistake
Well, to be fair, if your boss wants another font and it's your job to put fonts in documents and you mess it up you can't really blame it on your boss for wanting them in the first place 
Managers wanting changes just so they can change something sounds familiar though 
|
|
|
|
|
Sander Rossel wrote: you can't really blame it on your boss
True I guess... though you can cut the brake cables on their car. I don't know, just putting suggestions out there... each to their own and whatnot.
|
|
|
|
|
I tried that once, then I remembered I'm self employed
|
|
|
|
|
Sander Rossel wrote: I thought the whole idea of PDF's was that they look the same on every computer?
I guess that is the idea. Reality may be different from the ideas 
When PDF was first released, my office computer had a 40 Mbyte disk drive (my new home PC had an enormous size 200 Mbyte SCSI disk!). 5.25" floppies (720 kbytes) were still a common storage format. Font files were no smaller in those days than they are today. If you had a thousand tiny PDF documents on your disk, having a thousand copies of the stanard Times Roman font would be a terrible waste of space. (This was before people went crazy with two hundred fonts in every document, so chances were much higher that they all used Times Roman or one of the other half-dozen "standard" fonts that was available everywhere. I've got a book on typography from those days, recommending that you limit yourself to two, at most three, diffent typefaces in any document, and at most three point sizes of each typeface.)
So PDF was designed with the option to embed into the document either the complete font definition (especially for documents intended to be edited in PDF format), or only information about characters actually uses (for read-only documents) or none at all, for a font that is assumed to be universally available. This choice is made on a font-by-font basis - you can leave out the standard fonts, but embed special fonts.
Today, with multi-terabyte disks and optical fiber communication, we don't see any reason for not embedding a fifty megabyte unicode font file with a half-page PDF document. 50 meg is nothing... Even a thousand such documents is just 50 gig of font information...
Fortunately, most font files are much smaller; few are above even one megabyte. But there are still space conserving people out there - or the standard settings of the document production system was made in the time when there were space conserving people around, and none has touched the settings since.
Bottom line: You are not guaranteed that a PDF document looks identical everywhere. It might depend on fonts not embedded.
|
|
|
|
|
I didn't know that.
But I rarely use any non-standard fonts.
Sounds logical to not embed those though, especially in those days.
|
|
|
|
|
GLOBAL MEAT CONSUMPTION IS A HOAX!
It's just what the cows want you to believe so that they don't go extinct.
It's kind of funny to think that if the vegans do take over, we might have to go to a zoo to see a cow and chicken (or watch re-runs on the famous Cartoon Network show).
|
|
|
|
|
musefan wrote: It's kind of funny to think that if the vegans do take over, we might have to go to a zoo to see a cow and chicken
Kind of funny and kind of sad!
musefan wrote: or watch re-runs on the famous Cartoon Network show
YESSS!
|
|
|
|
|
Sander Rossel wrote: ** Yes, we should all eat meat because it's natural and you're very insecure about your masculinity if you don't vent your love for meat on the internet, also, this post is not about that.
I'm not sure about that! I have put myself on a strict vegan diet now. From now on, I will only eat vegans*.
Please note, however, that this excludes Vogons, unless, of course they start to recite poetry.
* Mostly large dead cows an'stuff like that.
|
|
|
|
|
Sander Rossel wrote: How did this ever get through QA or how did the person creating this not notice it?
What is this 'QA' that you talk about?
|
|
|
|
|
For some reason, the words "Quetzalcoatl Aztec" was the first thing that came to mind 
It means that the Aztecs were punished by the god Quetzalcoatl for not properly testing their software
|
|
|
|
|
Similar story, this week; got to choose a christmaspresent, and wanted the box with food. When I logged in, that option was already gone, so I selected another one. Got an email bit later saying they were out of those also.
The order-email is in Dutch, but filled with English tags like "spacer" to indicate which cells in the table should be blanc (and thus, aren't), and "label header", "label side" tags.
With a required field for the telephone (which is not relevant to getting the gift, but may be sold to others) and an emailfield that you have to supply twice. At least they made sure that both the emailadresses should be the same 
Sander Rossel wrote: How did this ever get through QA or how did the person creating this not notice it?
QA prolly being a one-person team, called "the manager", who nods once and simply assumes that the "spacer" tags will be replaced in the final version.
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
|
|
|
|
|
Eddy Vluggen wrote: and simply assumes that the "spacer" tags will be replaced in the final version
That's how it goes though.
Everyone assumed someone else will find the bugs.
It happened to my house, seven parties (builder, government, some instances whose sole job it is to check the figures...) messed up and my house had to be broken down and built back up.
I'm just happy that they found out during the building and not when I already lived there 
|
|
|
|
|
Sander Rossel wrote: messed up and my house had to be broken down and built back up.
I often made the joke that builders always plan ahead better than coders, because they "can't" rollback their work when they find a serious problem.
Sounds like they actually did just that. Rollback to the previous house by hand
Bastard Programmer from Hell
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
|
|
|
|
|
Yeah, the piles were too short, meaning my house sunk in the sand.
They tried to somehow make the piles longer by drilling holes underneath the house, kind of like the quick and dirty bug fix, but that plan didn't work even though it was approved by nine(!) different parties.
Ultimately, they replaced the whole team, tore down the houses, and started from scratch with piles that were three times longer than the original ones.
All of the buyers were happy with the new houses because we lost faith in the original ones.
Everyone was reimbursed for damages (having to rent longer, having to delay your wedding because these people can't live together before they marry because somehow God has a problem with that so it was all exactly planned, etc.).
I don't think the building company made any profits on these houses
|
|
|
|
|
General 
News 
Suggestion 
Question 
Bug 
Answer 
Joke 
Praise 
Rant 
Admin 
Submit an article or tip
![Java | [Coffee]](https://codeproject.global.ssl.fastly.net/script/Forums/Images/coffee.gif)
, and I don't expect them hiring pros to do that job thoroughly 
. I suspect the first one who did so much as express an ability to create a PDF ![Rose | [Rose]](https://codeproject.global.ssl.fastly.net/script/Forums/Images/rose.gif)
