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

Wed Jul 11 13:58:34 CDT 2007

Hi Steve,

As you'll see by reading my other responses, and other responses to my 
inquiry, I understand now that this was Adobe Reader's way of saying that it 
was empty of text, not actually literally empty. It's not a problem of 
splitting hairs, it's a problem of bad writing and design. The message 
doesn't say what it means. That's a problem, as far as I'm concerned. Not 
some little semantic mind game. People have gotten so used to hearing things 
badly expressed in instructional writing, on the radio, and elsewhere that 
they just accept it and think that there's some vagueness that's simply 
inherent in things, that you just can't always know what people mean, even 
when all they're supposed to be conveying is straight-ahead information, not 
anything nuanced. And that's not right. I mean, people aren't right to think 
that it's all a muddle, and how can any normal person expect to understand 
what is told or explained, these days? Not true. People just don't write 
something clearly and accurately, and no one catches it, and so this sort of 
mumbling goes out into the world. Warning! Empty document! What, it's some 
fort of dangerous situation? Where are you supposed to have gone ahead of 
time to learn to anticipate this message and understand what it actually 
meahns? That's a rhetorical question. You shouldn't have to have done some 
kind of preparatory study to know what happened when you tried to open the 
.pdf file with Adobe Reader. It should say something that *tells* you what's 
wrong, if only in a very laconic way. Not Danger! High explosive Image File! 
Call authorities! Yeesh.

Anyway, let's see. First of all, I have Open Book, and it's got a capability 
like that. I can try to get the hang of that, plus Charles revealed to me 
that Office Tools and Word could be used, too. And Ray, God bless him, 
simply ran the thing through one of those processes and sent me the decoded 
file! So I've been rescued this time. But I really want to try to do this on 
my own with one of these methods I have available, so I can learn how to 
manage this kind of challenge.

Last, I did not *mean* too send an attachment, whatever sort of 
inconvenience you're implying that creates. Taking up server space, maybe? 
In any case, I didn't even think it would go through. So, sorry if I did the 
wrong thing.
Joel
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Steve Jacobson" <steve.jacobson at visi.com>
To: "NFBnet GUI Talk Mailing List" <gui-talk at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Wednesday, July 11, 2007 11:19 AM
Subject: Re: [gui-talk] need help to open a difficult .pdf file

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.

_______________________________________________
gui-talk mailing list
gui-talk at nfbnet.org
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/gui-talk

-- 
No virus found in this incoming message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.5.476 / Virus Database: 269.10.2/894 - Release Date: 7/10/2007 
5:44 PM