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Re: PDF and searchable text for scanned documents

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From: Steve Green
Date: Sep 29, 2020 10:34AM

From a technical perspective, there is nothing wrong with the document. Unicode mapping is perfectly acceptable, and no tool can know which mappings are intentional and which are not. In a sense it's no different from a change of language in a web page. As long as the change of language is indicated programmatically, a tool has no idea if the change is intentional or an error. As such, there is no fault to detect. I am not even sure I agree that there is an omission from the accessibility guidelines.

I would be very interested to know who remediated the document, because they should have identified such a fundamental issue as this.

If you want to send it to me I can take a look with QuickFix and see how easy it would be to fix the Unicode mappings. If there is only one font, it might be 5 minutes' work. On the other hand, if there are lots of fonts or a very large character set it could take much longer.

Steve