Re: PIL 3rd electronic version

[Coda Highland <chighland@...>]

On Wed, May 15, 2013 at 10:19 AM, Steve Litt <slitt@troubleshooters.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 15 May 2013 15:23:57 +0200
> Wolfgang Pupp <wolfgang.pupp@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Steve Litt wrote:
>> > Serious bummer. When you copy from the PDF version and paste into a
>> > text file, the result is gibberish characters.
>>
>> If complaining to FeistyDuck won't make them remove this "anti-piracy
>> scheme" (or whatever this is supposed to achieve),
>
> I don't think it's anti-piracy, because the normal text, the
> explanations, the part you *should* protect, are easily copyable. No, I
> think this was just a dumb mistake, no different from the programmer
> who never bothers to watch his code being used in production, and
> therefore leaving some "why in the WORLD did he do that?" mistakes in
> the code.
>
> By the way, all of my eBooks are personalized just like the Feistyduck
> one, but AFAIK, everything in my eBooks is copy/pasteable. And my
> eBooks aren't even programming books.
>
> Thanks,
>
> SteveT
>
> Steve Litt                *  http://www.troubleshooters.com/
> Troubleshooting Training  *  Human Performance
>

I haven't purchased the book, but if I had to take a guess: The code
examples are in a different font than the body text, aren't they? So
the PDF just assigned unused glyphs to that text so it only has one
bank of characters in the embedded font. I'm sure there's a compelling
reason for PDF generation software to do this; perhaps it's more
consistent in rendering across viewers, or perhaps it generates
smaller files. Of course, the side effects rather thwart that for this
use case.

/s/ Adam