[gui-talk] need help to open a difficult .pdf file

[Steve Jacobson]

Joel,

As you have likely already seen, the attachment did go to the entire list.  While we allow attachments, obviously, it is always best to wait and send attachments to 
individuals who have a special interest in it.

Not surprisingly, I tried opening the document with Window-Eyes and as I expected, I received the same message.  Generally, this message arises when a document 
contains images of pages rather than the actual text.  Sometimes, people scan pages and put them into a PDF document without performing character recognition 
thinking that the PDF process makes the document accessible, or they don't think about accessibility at all.  Since the file contains a series of pictures of each page, 
there is no text to be passed to the screen reader.  While it is incorrect for the message to say the document is empty, it is empty of text that can be read.  Yes I 
know, that's splitting hairs.  It gets confusing because the text on the screen generally looks just fine.  

If you need to read this file, some of the OCR packages will go in and perform OCR on such PDF documents and make them readable. Besides Kurzweil 1000, 
which is expensive, OmniPage and FineReader both have this capability.  They are not cheap, either, but if you happen to own any of them, you might be in luck.  It 
also seems to me that there was an inexpensive OCR package that did this as well but the name escapes me.  I hope this is of some value.

On Wed, 11 Jul 2007 09:24:58 -0700, Joel Deutsch wrote:

>Hi,

>Usually, when I encounter a .pdf file, I can click on it and have it open 
>and become readable with Adobe Reader. I have the latest version, if I 
>remember correctly, and it set itself up to interact with Jaws when I 
>installed it.

>But with this file, when I try to open it, I get the Adobe interface screen 
>(I can see this happening) but, within a few seconds after I hear the usual 
>message that Adobe's preparing the document for reading, a message comes on 
>saying Warning! Empty document.

>Warning? This is like a terrorist problem or something? Anyway, I'm sure 
>it's not an empty (does that mean blank?) document to the person who sent it 
>to me. Why is Adobe saying it's empty, now?

>I'm I composed this message as a forward in order to retain the .pdf file 
>attachment, but I just realized it'll be stripped out of the email as the 
>message is distributed. Oh, well. So if anyone more experienced than me 
>would like to try their hand at opening the file so they can help me figure 
>out how to handle an impasse like this, just write me at 
>jdeutsch at dslextreme.com, and I'll gladly send the file as I meant to do here 
>to begin with.

>thankss a lot.