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 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.
Lucky me has been a speed reader basically from the start. I cannot imagine how painfully slow 238 words per minute must feel. The brain has probably forgotten half of the story when the reader reaches the end of a book weeks later. As a teenager, I already read about five books a day. Autism has its advantages…
It only needs one right drone with the right payload at the right place and time…
Yes, indeed. Can you buy or build a drone in the US? No problem. Can you get explosives or other nasty stuff to arm it? No issue for a determined group. Can you find an undefended soft target? Of course, there is a smorgasboard of those.
Just look at the list of countries that the USA has pissed off in the last whatever years, and choose one at random.
From a conman like Trump I expected nothing less but a ripoff.
Some people read a hundred books in their lifetime and keep 30. The 10k books on those shelves only represent a small part of what I have read in my lifetime.
American TV was a news source?
When we moved in, the neighbors daughter was curious about the “new ones”, and asked if she could help.
I told her that I would be putting the books on the shelves the next day, and she promised to come over.
I don’t know what she expected (when we visited them, I never saw a book in their place), but she was shocked when she saw a large pile of boxes. I had just finished installing the first wall of shelves, and told her that we would have to sort the boxes out, only about 10k books were for the living room, the other would go up into the studio…
Old laptops can be another good thing. Back in the times of Win98, when Microsoft issued stickers with license keys for Win and Office, I got hold of five laptops from a bankruptcy auction for about a dollar each because they didn’t work.
I took them apart for RAMs and harddisks (quite successfully, only one RAM was botchy), and then took the saw to the cases, cutting out the part with the license stickers on the back.
I sold them to a business for about five dollars a piece…
Don’t worry, Apple saved you here. While the plug is technically a USB C, it must be an Apple charger to properly charge their crap-phones. Anything “less” only allows very slow charging.
Did anyone really expect them to tell the truth? Lets see what the real specs will be. Maybe it is a repackaged Pixel 3 or 4…
I consider this as the final confirmation that he wants to bring the government down.
If you ever need to edit a PDF that way, just use Inkscape. It is way better than LO draw for that.