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by 1718627440 180 days ago
No, I don't have any. It is because it was not so much a bug, but a decision about a tradeoff. They compressed by unifying similar looking glyphs. Sure, these glyphs weren't representing the same character, but they did look similar. It is the kind of error an human could also have made, except humans also know that sums are supposed to match, so they take that into account when reading. Also they have a probability score and when they are unsure they read again or ask. This are all things these printers can't do without doing supervised OCR.

The tested scans did look kind of crappy, so if you care about non altered glyphs maybe don't do a lossy compression on a low resolution scan. So these issue can totally happen with any printer if your resolution is too low, the glyphs are ambigous and you use a too aggressive lossy compression. This also happens with other approaches like vectorization or OCR.
1 comments
panick21_ 179 days ago
Yes and by default your tradeoff should be to have the correct information. And that's actually what Xerox claimed. They said this was false and it was correctly documented. They said only if you select it this would happen. Watch the CCC talk buy the person that figured this out. Turns out they were wrong.
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1718627440 179 days ago
> Watch the CCC talk buy the person that figured this out. Turns out they were wrong.

I already did, although some time ago. Kriesel also has some other interesting talks, e.g. about the German Railway company.

Like I totally think Xerox is at fault, but what they actually did wrong was using bad defaults (and lying when they got told). This can totally occur with any software. From looking at the pictures I think part of the issue was that the input resolution was lower than what the compression was tested with, not the compression part per se.

Also I think the customers are at least partially at fault for digitalizing, but not checking. Don't be stingy on important data. And who in there sane minds throws away the originals????? Like you can throw away copies all the way you like, but NEVER the original. (Except when you really want to "destroy" information.) To me that was the most ridiculous part, assuming software (being famous for bugs like no other tool) can never be wrong and throwing away physical things only relying on your random files to exist.

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panick21_ 179 days ago
I haven't watched the talk since I saw it, but my memory was that they did it in a mode where they claimed it wasn't supposed to happen. So it would happen even if the costumer selected the right one. Maybe my memory is bad on that.
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1718627440 179 days ago
My memory also tells me that.

> I haven't watched the talk since I saw it

Funny statement, sounds like a tautology and still contains information.

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panick21_ 179 days ago
I mean I never watched the video (or maybe I did and I don't remember), I only 'saw' the presentation live. And I remember that room being a riot. So I might get some details wrong. Not sure this is correct english.
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