Traced text on Illustrator CC rendering very strangely (creating outlines) - adobe-illustrator

I need to trace a text in my illustration, and for some very odd reason, all of a sudden, illustrator is rendering the traced text as shown below. I always use this tool and I never had any problems.
Text without tracing:
Text after tracing (creating outlines):

Got it! I had to chose "preview from CPU" under the "view" menu :)

Related

Converting link-like texts to links

I just noticed some very strange behaviour in my pdf.
I have a link in there (just pure text!) "www.example.com".
Now when I view this in my reader (Sumatra & Adobe) this link has a "hand" icon and I'm able to click on it. Even though I just put it as real text in there.
So I converted it to PS (pdftops ), found the text (\000w\000w\000w etc), and just changed the first "W" to "A".
Then I convert it via ps2pdf back into a PDF file, and wonder... No link anymore. (it shows now aww.example.com).
So, back to the ps file, I change the a again to w, and re-convert.
Suddenly the link is there again.
Because of this I'm pretty certain this is some feature with the reader that it's being too smart for its own good.
Which brings me to my question: how can I turn this off? Is there any comment/setting I can give which would disable this behaviour for that specific PDF file?
[the problem is that the reader is just adding "http://" in front of it to create the link, and when clicking, my reader warns me that the link is not safe. Talking about insults and injuries!]
Thanks!

PDF with OCR text visible, how to hide it from existing PDF

I have several PDF files that have been OCR-processed (not by me). They contain both the scanned image and the OCR text. They seem to work fine in some viewers (iPhone/iPad), but not in others (Preview.app on macOS) which makes them somewhat awkward to read.
From googling around, it seems that the text & image may be layered incorrectly or there is a problem with the fonts used? I'm not even sure I'm using the correct vocabulary, as most hits I get are worthless.
Is it possible to use ghostscript or something to batch-fix these files?
Example of "bad" rendering:
Its impossible to say what's wrong with the PDF file (or viewer) without seeing the PDF file, which alse makes it hard to propose solutions!
You could certainly run the file through Ghostscript to the pdfwrite device, and use the -dFILTERTEXT switch to not process the text. The resulting document would therefore not contain the offending text, but would still contain the image.
Of course, this would then not be possible to search or highlight.
You could instead use -dFILTERIMAGE which would remove the original image leaving the text behind. But then anything in the original document which was not text would now be missing.
The usual 'best practice' is to have the text drawn in rendering mode 3, which makes no marks. This allows you to see the original image without the OCR'ed text interfering. Its possible that the viewer you are using is not honouring the text rendering mode, which would be a (fairly serious) bug in the viewer. The most recent versions of MacOS seems to have some nasty bugs in the Quartz PDF rendering engine.
The other way to do this is to draw the text first, then put the original image on top of it, but that's hard to get wrong, I suspect its more likely the text rendering mode.
EDIT
The PDF file first draws the text, then draws the image on top of the text. The underlying text should not appear. mkl is quite correct in his comment.
The correct way to fix this is to fix the consumer which is rendering it incorrectly. As I mentioned above the latest version of Quartz seems to have some fairly serious bugs, you might choose to raise this as a bug with Apple.
The only other solution would be to run this through something which will remove the text. Ghostscript can do this but there are implications; firstly it will no longer be possible to search/copy/paste text from the document. Secondly you would need to run quite a complex command line in order to prevent the decompressed JPX images being recompressed as JPEG, which would probably result in compromised quality. Finally the resulting file size would be larger.

Is there any way to prevent losing text when converting a PDF to a PNG when using <CFPDF>?

Using the following code to generate thumbnails from PDFs (ColdFusion 8):
<cfpdf
action="thumbnail"
source="#LOCAL.PathToMyPDF#"
destination="#LOCAL.ImageDestination#"
format="png"
scale="100"
resolution="high"
overwrite="true"
pages="1" />
Sometimes it works great and generates a beautiful PNG representation of the first page. However, many times, it ends up creating a PNG with none of the text that's in the PDF, or with the text mangled or background images out of arrangement.
Is there any way to prevent this? I'm open to using a non-commercial java library, if necessary.
Without looking into this too deep, I would think you are having a font problem.
Try to run that bit of code with this parameter nofonts = "true" (which removes font styling) and see if you get your text (not styled).
If that works then you may need to register your fonts in Coldfusion (so Coldfusion has access to the fonts library). If you are not sure what fonts your PDF uses then you can check file, properties and click the font tab to see the fonts your PDF uses.
Check this link for more explanation on Coldfusion and fonts.
Again, I am not sure about your server and font set up because it wasn't mentioned in your post, so this is my best guess for you...
:)

Exported PDFs from Mathematica 8 won't print

UPDATE: I wrote to Wolfram support about this and will update the post if they can resolve the problem. Sorry for spamming SO with a technical support question, but here it remains in case anyone else is having the same issue.
Is anyone else having this problem with Mathematica 8? I recently upgraded and noticed that when I export Graphics to a PDF file, although the file appears fine on my computer, it prints as a blank page. For example, try
Rectangle[{1,1}]//
Graphics//
Export["~/test.pdf",#]&
which creates a PDF file containing a black square. This file opens fine, but if I send it to my department printer I just get a blank page. If I don't export the graphics but print the notebook from MM, no problem, the graphics print as expected. If I use MM 7 to do exactly the same thing, the PDF file prints as expected. Exporting to PNG in MM8 seems to work fine. And, using the context menu Save Graphics As ... or File > Save Selection As ... to create a PDF containing just the graphic also works. However, these graphics eventually get included in a TeX document, and it would be far better if I could continue using the script I've got that doesn't require any button clicking to generate them.
I'm running MM 8.0.0.0 on Mac OS 10.6.7. I have not been able to test this on another printer yet, but this printer has never given me problems before and prints other PDF documents fine. Any ideas why this is happening?
Wolfram Research responds:
...
This issue has been reported by other users as
well and our developers are currently looking into it. I have added your
details to the report so you can be notified when this is resolved.
In the meantime, the alternatives that you could try are:
Try a different printer.
Rasterize the image with the function 'Rasterize' before exporting. If
the rasterized image loses some resolution, you could use the option
'ImageResolution' to edit this.
Rasterize[image, ImageResolution -> xxx]
Surely this is a bug (please report it to support#wolfram.com), but you can work around the problem by selecting the graphic and choosing File > Save Selection As... from the menu (or Save Graphic As... from the contextual menu). This produces a slightly different file that doesn't appear to exhibit the undesirable behavior we observe from Export[].
These problematic files, and LaTeX PDFs that include them, can be properly printed by Adobe Reader 10.1.2. That's if you're okay with installing and using a 450MB PDF reader.
I reproduced the problem (leading me to this question) with Mathematica 8.0.4.0 on Mac OS X 10.7.2. Wolfram suggested lame workarounds like Rasterize and told me
This issue has been addressed by our developers, and a fix will be included in a future version of Mathematica.

image colors in pdf files in vb.net

I'm creating a program to generate PDF files in VB.Net.
Everything is working fine except that the image is being displayed with a blue background while the image provided doesn't have any.
Following are the lines of code being used:
sColor = IIf(mvarEncodeASCII85, ToASCII85(ImgColor),
(System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding(1252).GetString(ImgColor)))
What am I doing wrong?
There is not alot of details, but my first thougt is that it is .png-files or .gif-files.
Am I correct? In that case it may be an issue with adobe acrobat handling the transparent backgrounds.
As I said it's hard to say exactly without any further details.