BIA letter and Middleboro’s awful PDF
Recently I posted about the letter sent by the Middleboro BOS to the BIA opposing any change to the tribe’s LIT application. I thought people might want to see the actual letter.
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The PDF document, like many Middleboro documents is a scan of a document. The means that it is essentially a giant picture that you can’t copy text from. Instead of a PDF – Portable Document Format you have a Painful Document Format. Middleboro releases documents in this fashion on purpose to make it difficult for people to share and discuss the content. A “normal” PDF document is created in one step – you have a file such as a Word document and you convert it to PDF often by use of a PDF printer – a piece of software that appears as a printer but produces a PDF file instead of a printed sheet of paper. This document was created by taking a printed sheet of paper and running it through a scanner – which essentially takes a picture of the document. Depending on your scanner, you might retrieve the scanned document by email or some other means.
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Creating a good PDF
- Open document
- Print/Save to PDF
Middleboro method of creating a bad PDF
- Open document
- Print document
- Retrieve document from printer
- Run document through a scanner
- Transfer PDF to your computer
- Dispose of wasted printed sheets paid for by Middleboro taxpayers
- Let loose evil chuckle and congratulate yourself for making it difficult for the taxpayer/citizen to extract text from the public document
Hooray for Middleboro IT
So is it rank ignorance or deliberate impediments?
Remember the old “Never attribute malice to that which can easily be explained by stupidity”
Well, Bumpkin, maybe someone typed the document on an IBM Selectric II. Can’t make a PDF of that. And it wouldn’t surprise me based on how technically advanced their IT department is.
@Tony Lawrence
Most of Middleboro – particularly the town government part of it – hates my guts and I’m OK with that. Somebody who tolerates me and is chummy with people in town government told me that they do this on purpose to make the documents difficult to work with.
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As secondary corroboration, I once called the BOS secretary to get a non-scanned copy of the town warrant of one of the upcoming town meetings. I forget if it was the current secretary or last one. She told me that she couldn’t give me a copy of the original document because the town was “afraid of people altering it”. Now I wasn’t asking to go into town hall, sit at a computer and mess with the town archives – I just wanted something I could copy/paste from for discussion on my forum.
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Those two pieces of information – one firsthand and the other secondhand – convinces me that these horrible, hokey, unusable scans are intentional to make things more difficult for the taxpayer.
1. Print out the document.
2. Scan it
3. Run it through your favorite OCR program.
4. Save as PDF or whatever file you like.
5. Spend hours correcting what the scanner didn’t pick up.
6. Put .45 bullet through screen.
7. Break out the Jack…