Today's bonkers bug report: Microsoft Edge can't print numbers Microsoft's Edge browser is the subject of an amusing new bug report, alleging it somehow manages to screw up printing strings of numbers. The report on Microsoft's developer portal describes the issue where PDF files printed through Edge will display numbers and text incorrectly when exported. "Edge displays PDF correctly …
"What do you expect from a company that went from Windows 8 to 10?"
Of course! They were using an early version of Edge while developing it!
(See also: Microsoft's claims about how successful Windows 10 deployment has been, while world+dog was avoiding it at all costs.)
"who might have reason to send an image to PDF."
if you buy something online, and they show a receipt in web format, sometimes it's best to make a copy, and PDF makes more sense than printing. I can't imagine a WORSE outcome than having the WRONG numerical information on that receipt when you try and track your package that didn't arrive for some reason...
"I can't imagine a WORSE outcome than having the WRONG numerical information on that receipt when you try and track your package that didn't arrive for some reason...
How about printing PDF boarding cards for airline flights? Bonus points if you have a foreign name or the wrong amount of melanin.
Like in Firefox, with the PDF tick widget added to Print Prevew by the "Print Edit" plugin; this creates mixed text and image PDFs, unlike the retarded, rendered-image-only PDFs of all PDF virtual printer drivers, which prevent later editing, text extraction, link use, and rendering re-flow!
Print Edit is wonderful for deleting the surrounding banners, adverts and social media strips, and other bloat from pages before printing, although some idiot web designers included F'd Up divs which prevent re-flow across several print pages, so truncate printing!
@Sampler
Until I read your comment I'd just thought, "Who cares" and "Why would you even want to".
But you've hit nail on head here.
Because the new Windows S**t version will tie users ( read "victims") to whatever Microsoft allows, making things like using Edge to create a PDF more likely.
Currently there are probably more ways to create a PDF of anything than there are ways to create the original content.
Publisher is a nice toy, but still a toy. It lacks several features to be a real DTP software, and also many have been removed lately. Because now most software is aimed at the millennials generation who are "digital natives", up to the point that many advanced features have to be removed form software otherwise they got lost and scratch their heads if they see things like CMYK and ICC. You take a selfie and publish it on Instagram with a cool filter, what else do you ask for???
Yet, I don't know how many Publisher users have color-managed workflow, including profiling monitors correctly. AFAIK PDF/X allows to embed (color calibrated) RGB images into a document with a CMYK output intent (yet, can Publisher crate them?), but then the printer RIP needs to support such features.
"now most software is aimed at the millennials generation who are "digital natives", up to the point that many advanced features have to be removed form software otherwise they got lost and scratch their heads "
Indeed. "Digital native" seems to be a euphamism for clueless idiot who knows how to use simple social media apps but doesn't have the first clue about how any of the tech works underneath. Analogy: They can drive the car (if its an automatic) but they have no idea how to check the oil never mind change it.
Personally I think the current generation despite being associated more with tech are a bunch of ignoramuses as far as its concerned. Hardly any of them (going by interviews we've done) seem to know any professional programming language such as C/C++/C# or java in any depth (as for assembler, yeah, right!). If we're lucky they might know python but normally their idea of coding is HTML,CSS and some junkscript to create a pretty web page. FFS.
The problem is that RGB deals with light, so 100%, 100%, 100% is white, while CMYK printing deals with ink, and 100%, 100%, 100%, 100% is black. CMYK 100%, 0%, 0%, 0% is also black, so is 100%, 10%, 10%, 0%, and 0%, 100%, 100%, 100% is pretty close to black too.
The gamuts (range of colours) are also completely different, CMYK is much more restrictive than RGB. A particular problem is bright light green, which is easy with RGB but impossible with CMYK.
To convert from RGB to CMYK you need an algorithm that works out how much ink is needed of each standard colour to make it look on paper like the RGB coloured light on a screen. There are many different algorithms, and each algorithm has many parameters you can set to compensate for paper type, etc. The only way to have accurate control over printed colours is therefore to work in the CMYK colour space. RGB is too vague.
Then you get "spot colours" where an additional ink is added where the ink itself is a custom colour...
Converting pure white and pure black is easy enough, the problem is everything between. First, a printer will charge you if it has to process your files into the required format. Second, you will usually have very little control on how your files will be processed.
Professional software allow you to soft (and hard) proof the results. The destination color space is emulated on screen (or prints from your local printer) to show the actual results (it's still an approximation, but usually good enough to avoid a lengthy and expensive process of fixing issues from actual prints). Just, remember you need profiles for the inks and paper that will be used.
Professional printers usually use standard ones (i.e. SWOP, FOGRA, etc.), and you would like to prepare output for them.
It's funny that while Microsoft is adding better support for color management in Windows, and better monitors are becoming available at lower prices, these features are being removed from Microsoft software.
It really looks Windows and its applications are being made dumber and dumber as if only some sort of "consumer zombie" is designed to use them. Once I would have found Publisher a welcome addition to the Office suite, now it's mostly a useless toy.
Hope Serif will release soon the Affinity version of PagePlus, to fill the niche of low price DTP software. InDesign CC is too expensive for occasional use.
Publisher kind of ended up as the poor relation to Word, though. Word moved from being a pure word processor into a kind of bastard hybrid between WP and DTP software around 2000-2005, leading to it being severely over-complicated for the former and still not being capable of the latter. And Publisher just kind of rotted on the shelf as Word absorbed it's purpose in life.
The end result is that MS now have no serious DTP package and 2 laughable ones.
Also, a good few years back MS decided that for home users Publisher wasn't to be included in the Office bundle. Why, God alone knows. I'm not sure Microsoft did. I equate this with the point where they stopped taking any notice of what customers would want. But for SoHo users not having Publisher meant using Word instead. And also there was a host of budget DTP offerings that could be used to create a church or club flier, or a quick poster, or a birthday card and so on. And of course the home users who then found themselves needing to knock out a bit of quick DTP when they were at work didn't go to Publisher, if they were used to using Word. I wouldn't be surprised if many of them even got their employers to buy Serif's offering even though they had Publisher already.
"The end result is that MS now have no serious DTP package and 2 laughable ones".
Looks in file cabinet for CD's of Office 2000, XP and the last really good version of Office, Office 2003. Fondly remembers no ribbon. Wonders if a VM Ware Virtual Machine of 7 with Office 2003 would run faster than a machine with 10 Supserspy Edition and the latest Office 2016? I suspect Office 2003 will not install on 10.
I haven't yet tried to install Office 2003 in Win 10, mainly because the last time I tried to install Office 2003 on a computer, Microsoft wouldn't allow activation. I did run across a copy of Office Professional for Windows 95 - that jewel of software drove me batty a couple decades ago because of a "feature" that would reindex all documents edited once a day. The only problem is some users had edited files on a strange thing called "floppy disks". If a floppy was not left in the drive at the time the reindexing occurred, the computer would freeze and would only respond to a hard boot - which was easy then because most computers then had a real power switch and not a power request button. I still don't trust any Microsoft product that requires indexing or maintaining a database. I've had too many problems with products from Microsoft that attempt to manipulate databases. Now it appears their operating systems require some type of indexing to even function, but I could be wrong on that.
"Once I would have found Publisher a welcome addition to the Office suite, now it's mostly a useless toy....InDesign CC is too expensive for occasional use."
Back in the mid-90s after I finished a group training of MS Publisher, one of the clients, a young girl, burst into tears. When I asked her what the problem was she explained she had been tasked with producing a monthly newsletter and that she now knew she'd never have enough time.
So, we did a cost-benefit analysis of using MS Publisher versus Pagemaker. A Pagemaker licence back then was well north of $AU1,000 and hiring me for a one-on-one training a further ~$AU400. Publisher may have been "free", but time is money. The cost difference looked like being amortised in 3–6 months.
As with most of my Pagemaker clients, the YL brought her first finished work for my perusal and very good it was, too. It helped that we had created a number of templates for the job during her training. The time-saving exceeded our original estimate.
The first book I created with InDesign more than justified the cost of the licence. The time-saving versus a low-end DTP tool can be quite dramatic. The book had over a thousand footnotes, only one of which had the required full stop at the end. Putting those in manually would have been a chore, but the GREP in InDesign made that a trivial task.
Hint: I purchased my first Pagemaker licence second hand for 20% of the RRP. That meant I paid very little more than for a "new" low end product.
"It really looks Windows and its applications are being made dumber and dumber as if only some sort of "consumer zombie" is designed to use them."
But, hasn't that been the case with all consumer digital technology over the past two decades?
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
