There’s an iOS game about the history of fonts you might enjoy. Struggling to find it at the moment, but you play a colon navigating through time, solving various puzzles.
Comment on Recreating uncensored Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments
schwim@piefed.zip 1 day ago
I am not intelligent enough to understand any of it but that was a fun read.
TIL the origin of Courier.
ZoteTheMighty@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
regedit@lemmy.zip 22 hours ago
I’m failing to understand why or how a part of the large intestine would time travel, nor why it would be bothered to solve puzzles! 🤔
ZoteTheMighty@lemmy.zip 20 hours ago
Sound alike your first task is to list out all the meanings of colon and figure out which one of them looks like wheels when turned sideways.
kescusay@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Long story short:
Source: I’m a software developer and I’m currently trying to recover one of these attachments.
proudblond@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Godspeed friend
apftwb@lemmy.world 1 day ago
🫡
apftwb@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Are you having as much trouble with OCR as the article author? I would have thought OCR was a solved problem in 2026 even with poor fonts.
kescusay@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I’m not having trouble with it as such, it’s just a slow and painstaking process. The source is crappy enough that an enormous number of characters need to be checked manually, and it’s ridiculously time-consuming.
floofloof@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
I wonder if they gave considered crowdsourcing this, having many people type in small chunks of the data by hand, doing their own character recognition? Get enough people in and enough overlap and the process would have some built-in error correction.
apftwb@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I mean the problem is that even with human eyes it’s still really hard to tell l and 1 in that font.
Taldan@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
OCR is mostly good enough. Problem here is we have 76 pages that we need to be read perfectly, with a low fidelity input
We also have very little in the way of error correction, since it’s mostly not human readable
trolololol@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Curious here, this is base 64? And what’s behind it is more often than not an image or text? And you need to do ocr to get the characters?
Maybe for the text it could use a dictionary to rubber stamp whether that zero is actually a letter oh, etc etc?
I’m curious to know what the challenge is and what your approach is.
kescusay@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Yes, it’s base64. And what’s behind it could be anything that can be attached to an email.
In this case, it’s a PDF. If the base64 text can be extracted accurately, then the PDF that was attached to the email can be recreated.
The challenge is basically twofold:
As for my approach, I’m basically just slowly and painstakingly running several OCR tools on small bits at a time, merging the resulting outputs, and doing my best to correct mistakes manually.
trolololol@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Ah yes pdf is a clusterfuck where anything is valid I think, so minimal redundancy.
Text and image formats are way more lenient and are full of redundancies.