What I did back when I painted miniatures was that I had a small box with the colors, and lent it to my friends, on the condition they added one color for every miniature they painted with it. Total win-win. It cost them 2.50 per figure, and the range of colors ever increased. In the end, there were over 30 pots in the box.

Well, at least you now know that happens next in the US.

First of all, he should drop Python for anything resource intensive as such a simulation. And then think about how to optimize the algorithm.

And they were not intended as good-night-stories.

No, that is just the biggest state.

Yep. One guy in my class had an exchange student from Texas. Absolute biggest asshole. A real advertisement for Texas: “Never go to a state where they breed idiots like that.”

FTFY: the biggest usable (mentally) unstable state.

Wrong OS.

Having a number of phone numbers in my private PBX available, I set one as an “audio note” system. I can call that number, there is no prompt but the beep, I can leave a message, and get it in my mail as an mp3.

Yep, you re right.

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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.

If you ever need to edit a PDF that way, just use Inkscape. It is way better than LO draw for that.

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.

I’ve already read more than half of those.

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.

Yes, I probably am in the top percent. But as it is an autism based ability, it also comes with it’s number of problems. You probably would not want to switch with me.

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.

Still off. I’m faster, and I’m older.