mozilla/pdf.js — Issue #1273: Some issues in a paywalled pdf
Author: gigaherz
Created: 2012-02-24 10:36:32+00:00
State: open

There's some problems displaying this pdf: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221700000552

The document is paywalled so I don't know any of you will be able to see it.

This is the beginning of the document as rendered by pdf.js: http://i39.tinypic.com/358rz48.jpg
And this is the same from Adobe Reader: http://i43.tinypic.com/psrp1.png

Some of the issues that I see in the current firefox extension from github:

1. There's some semitransparent gray blocks around that don't exist in Adobe Reader
2. The black&white bitmaps seem to be interpolated in black&white, causing them to look funny after scaling (converting 1bit images to grayscale may be a nice thing)
3. The text is cut at the baseline, removing the "tails" from "y", "g", etc.

On top of that, this pdf has the annoying issue of mapping glyphs to the wrong chars, so it makes it impossible to copypaste from it without an intermediate OCR (even in Adobe Reader)... not that I expect pdf.js to actually do an OCR to fix that ;P

This is the abstract cut & extracted from the pdf:
http://www.smallfiles.org/download/174/A_hybrid_genetic_algorithm_for_the_container_loading_problem_abstract_.pdf.html

It shows all the 3 issues I mentioned above, and since the same text is available in public sites I believe it should be ok for me to share it (and I will remove this link and the file itself from the hosting if anyone asks me to).