Friday 3 February 2012

PDF Printing in Google Chrome: Bug? or should I worry?

I just received a PDF in my email ... and thought I'd view it and print it out.

First report ok.. my client's report looked fine.  Second report... er... The letters in their logo were scrambled and replaced with other letters.

The report was generated in MS Access... an Access Report that I originally created for my client.  It includes their logo as a BMP.  My client prints the report to a PDF, using something like CutePDF or pdf995.  He then emails the reports to my GApps.

I click on View next the the PDF.  And the Print.  I can then see the standard PDF print dialog.  So far the document looks ok to me.

However on the hard copy the text from the Logo has changed:


So I closed the PDF in the browser window, went back to my email, clicked on View again and re-printed... and all was fine.

Anybody want to hazard a guess what is happening?  Thoughts...
  • Is Google OCRing my [private] PDF, when it attempts to convert to a printable file?
  • The printer driver on my computer is doing it?  How does it know that I am printing letters in the PDF?
  • A virus?
  • If Google is putting the PDF through an OCR so that I can search it within Google Docs... then should I be worried about that?  
I think I will stick to using the Download option in future.  And print via Adobe Acrobat Viewer... Google Docs might be convenient, but I'm not sure I can trust the Chrome/Docs print service with confidential PDFs, until I know why this logo was not printed wysywig...


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