Some People Shouldn't Be Allowed to Use a Computer
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I work with TIFFs everyday
Holy smokes! You are the first person I have ever known of to be using tiffs. I can now cross this off my bucket list. Thanks.
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
You can cross it off twice! I also work where lots of paper is scanned, and TIFF rules the roost 'round here. Over the years I've written lots of code to do various interesting things with them (mostly because the company I work for has a serious Not Invented Here syndrome). When much of the development work involves manipulating multi-page scans at a low level from many different sources, any sane person* would take TIFF any day of the week over PDF! *not to imply that I fit that description
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We just received an email, with an attached PDF, containing a black & white scan, of a printout, of a screenshot of an error message that was in a copyable text box. W. T. E. :doh: :confused:
I've done that when the underlying window context is important.
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We just received an email, with an attached PDF, containing a black & white scan, of a printout, of a screenshot of an error message that was in a copyable text box. W. T. E. :doh: :confused:
I've had tickets like that before. I had one where someone took a screenshot, then pasted it into Word, then (mystifyingly) took a screenshot of Word and attached that to the ticket. By that point, the original screenshot was shrunk to the point of uselessness. One wonders the thought process behind something like that.
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I've done that when the underlying window context is important.
You've taken a screen shot, printed it out, scanned the print out, embedded it into a PDF, and then emailed it? Screen shots I get, but this was way out there. And it couldn't even simply be the computer had no internet connection and they didn't have a portable storage device either, because this was a web app.
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Well, I work in a program that users often scan documents into, and TIFF has always been well supported by scanners. And there's the fact that it can have multiple pages, making it even better for the task. Add in the extensibility (that we don't make use of), and it's a pretty powerful format without being ridiculously complicated; the spec is around 100 pages IIRC, vs. nearly 700 for PDF v1.3 (I think it's on v1.7 now, so that's probably even longer).
lewax00 wrote:
vs. nearly 700 for PDF v1.3 (I think it's on v1.7 now, so that's probably even longer).
Got a couple of the spec docs sitting around here, PDFReference15_v6.pdf - 1172 pages, 8,975kb (pdfreference12.pdf - 394 pages, 1,478kb) Not exactly the most interesting reading I've had the luck of being tasked with. :^)
"Science adjusts its views based on what's observed. Faith is the denial of observation, so that belief can be preserved." - Tim Minchin
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You've taken a screen shot, printed it out, scanned the print out, embedded it into a PDF, and then emailed it? Screen shots I get, but this was way out there. And it couldn't even simply be the computer had no internet connection and they didn't have a portable storage device either, because this was a web app.
At least he didn't print it out and Fedex it to you.
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lewax00 wrote:
vs. nearly 700 for PDF v1.3 (I think it's on v1.7 now, so that's probably even longer).
Got a couple of the spec docs sitting around here, PDFReference15_v6.pdf - 1172 pages, 8,975kb (pdfreference12.pdf - 394 pages, 1,478kb) Not exactly the most interesting reading I've had the luck of being tasked with. :^)
"Science adjusts its views based on what's observed. Faith is the denial of observation, so that belief can be preserved." - Tim Minchin
Yeah, PDF is kind of the bane of my existence right now. On the upside, I figured out how to manually edit the files tripping up the system enough to get them through. Adobe still thinks they're ugly and tries to fix them, but I don't care as long as all the info is preserved and they don't put our PDF library into an infinite loop! :-D The sooner this whole episode is behind me the better.
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Yeah, PDF is kind of the bane of my existence right now. On the upside, I figured out how to manually edit the files tripping up the system enough to get them through. Adobe still thinks they're ugly and tries to fix them, but I don't care as long as all the info is preserved and they don't put our PDF library into an infinite loop! :-D The sooner this whole episode is behind me the better.
Commiserations my friend. I (still) feel your pain a couple of years after the fact. ;P But I do have self-written implementations in c++ and php, so that's kinda nice. Even using the hello-world examples in the docs verbatim, Acrobat 9 Pro still insists on 'fixing' them. :doh: PDF is the only reason the word Adobe ever crosses my mind these days. 1/2 way tempted to look into LaTex, to be honest.
"Science adjusts its views based on what's observed. Faith is the denial of observation, so that belief can be preserved." - Tim Minchin
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At least he didn't print it out and Fedex it to you.
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At least he didn't print it out and Fedex it to you.
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You can cross it off twice! I also work where lots of paper is scanned, and TIFF rules the roost 'round here. Over the years I've written lots of code to do various interesting things with them (mostly because the company I work for has a serious Not Invented Here syndrome). When much of the development work involves manipulating multi-page scans at a low level from many different sources, any sane person* would take TIFF any day of the week over PDF! *not to imply that I fit that description
The funny part is that today I was researching a bug with the webgrid control we use and getting out of memory error when someone tries to export too much data to tiff format. I was thinking to myself why in the world is .tiff even there. You have answered it. :)
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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Richard Deeming wrote:
user's taken a picture of the screen with their phone
Don't knock it. One of the most useful error reports I've received in recent memory included a two minute video taken with the service engineer's phone that demonstrated what the customer was doing to cause the problem. Without the video I wouldn't have had a clue what was going on. With it, it was straightforward to find and fix.
Software Zen:
delete this;Gary Wheeler wrote:
service engineer'
I think those are the relevant word there!
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH
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We just received an email, with an attached PDF, containing a black & white scan, of a printout, of a screenshot of an error message that was in a copyable text box. W. T. E. :doh: :confused:
Teach them that the PDF can be OCR'ed :)
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We just received an email, with an attached PDF, containing a black & white scan, of a printout, of a screenshot of an error message that was in a copyable text box. W. T. E. :doh: :confused:
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That really annoys me. Just send me the image, that way I can make it big enough to read, and if you could learn to crop... A screen shot of two large, widescreen monitors reduced to the size of a portrait word doc is impossible to read.
“I believe that there is an equality to all humanity. We all suck.” Bill Hicks
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You're lucky it was a screenshot. I've had error messages sent through where the user's taken a picture of the screen with their phone. X|
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined." - Homer
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We just received an email, with an attached PDF, containing a black & white scan, of a printout, of a screenshot of an error message that was in a copyable text box. W. T. E. :doh: :confused:
The explanation is obvious: the guy has no network access and can only send mail from the neighboring cybercafé, using Papernet for transfers.
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I've had tickets like that before. I had one where someone took a screenshot, then pasted it into Word, then (mystifyingly) took a screenshot of Word and attached that to the ticket. By that point, the original screenshot was shrunk to the point of uselessness. One wonders the thought process behind something like that.
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We just received an email, with an attached PDF, containing a black & white scan, of a printout, of a screenshot of an error message that was in a copyable text box. W. T. E. :doh: :confused:
It's because people know that us nerdy types go all round Robin Hood's barn to achieve simple things (I mean, even sort algorithms look ridiculously complex and difficult, to the un-nerdified), so they think they have to emulate that complexity when they communicate with us. So it's a courtesy, and you should be more appreciative.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Hmm, I just ignore such reports.... I'm blind and my screen reader cannot read graphics! ;P
