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apsonline

Garbled text on iPad

I have been using Cvision PDF Compressor to scan documents to PDFs for years and have several thousands of documents. I noticed recently that when I try to view some of these documents on an iPad using the GoodReader app, (and several other apps), the text is garbled and unreadable on certain pages. According to Cvision, the problem is with text rendering on the iPad because the same PDF file with garbled text on the iPad appears just fine when viewed on a PC or Mac. I'm curious to know if anyone else has had this same problem or may have some insight as to why this is happening. I have attached pages 4 and 5 of a document with the problem that I described. Page 4 looks just fine but page 5 is garbled.

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Jason C. Levine🇺🇸

Hi apsonline,

That looks like a font substitution issue to me. It may be that the orientation of the page is off during the scan so a different font gets used on that page and the iPad doesn't have an equivalent font so garbage results.

maytrix🇺🇸

I agree with Jason. Can you scan it to PDF as an image rather than text? If its scanned as an image, that may prevent the issue.

apsonline

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I dont think this is a font issue as I have turned off OCR on my scanning software but the problem still occurs.

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Jason C. Levine🇺🇸

Rather than posting the png, can you post the PDF itself and let us take a look at it? Again, the above looks to be the result of a bad scan more than anything else but I want to test the PDF on my system and iPad before sticking my neck out too much further.

apsonline

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Attached is the PDF; if you view it on an iPad, you will notice that pages 1, 7, and 10 appear garbled on the iPad but look fine when you open them on a PC or Mac.
20110406141437822.pdf

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Jason C. Levine🇺🇸

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apsonline

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apsonline

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I ended up resolving this through the vendor of our PDF creation software Cvista. They use a feature called autosegmentation that has to be turned off in order to prevent the garbled text issue on the iPad. Once I did this I am able to read documents on the iPad just fine, however I am not able to compress the file as much but it is an acceptible solution for now.

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apsonline

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apsonline

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iPad

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iPad is an iOS-based line of tablet computers built around the device's multi-touch screen, including a virtual keyboard. The iPad includes built-in Wi-Fi and cellular connectivity on select models. An iPad can shoot video, take photos, play music, and perform Internet functions such as web-browsing and emailing. Other functions – games, reference, GPS navigation, social networking, etc. – can be enabled by downloading and installing apps.