fi and ffi and really old tech impacting modern PDFs

Yes, some shit from so long ago impacts things today...

 

Okay. Hi, I had an interesting complaint from a customer today where the document we sent them demanding payment of a direct debit notification had weird errors on it.

Now, we sent them a notification of direct debit collection and a PDF and the PDF when they viewed it when they printed it. So they printed it and scanned it and sent it to us which is you know a lot of effort.

Every digit on that document, the date uh everything and the bank details and so on were all fives. Every digit was a five. And it wasn't even a complete five. It was like a truncated five. It was very messy

And there was also a weird thing where the word notification was notation.

Um, which doesn't make sense.

And this brought me back this brought me back a lot of decades. I mean, I don't know how many decades.

We've got to be talking 45 years, maybe.

My dad had a printing press. 

He's he actually had several over the years, including a big industrial one 

But he had a printing press.

And so he would compose things to print with an uppercase and lower case. And in those days that meant a wooden case of lead type upper and a wooden case of lead type lower.

And it had all of the letters you'd need.

And one of the letters in this was an FI.

Looks like this.

And there was also FFI.

That's not a terribly good example of an FI, but the the point is the FI sort of merged together where the dot over the I became the top of the F as a single lead character.

And that was the thing that that that's what you used.

Now fast forward today, we have.

Now first off just to address the complaint. The direct debit notification has plain text ASCII saying all of the details about the direct debit notification. everything, the amount, the account, the name, everything in plain text. Paper ASCII.

We may go as far as some UTF8 encoding of a pound sign, I think, and that's about as far as we go. But even that would still be readable

But we also add a PDF. And this is just a courtesy. People like this.

The PDF we use by default uses a font which has an alternative character set for the digits. So the digits can either be really fancy different sizes huge descenders weird or unified sort of spacing of the digits.

Now for any accounting purpose you want the digits that are unified spacing. You want digits that line up. And so by default, we use this alternate version of the character set on the font to make the digits line up and most things show it fine. The downside is copy and paste from it tends to be messed up, which is a real shame.

And I'd love to find a way of making that work. And it's all down to go script and god knows what. But anyway, most PDF viewers of the PDFs we send show the characters correctly.

This particular customer, I don't know what they have, but it shows all the alternate digit characters as a five.

So, everything was fives. What can I say? It's mad.

But a clue as to how bad it is is the FI character in the word notification did not show correctly, which gave gave him the wrong spelling, layout, whatever notification

So this just gave a clue of how bad his PDF view is. And what struck me is how this goes back to the days of that lead type, those 45 years ago and how that's impacting something happening in 2026 and that is just unbelievable.

So yeah, happens. Wow.

Crazy.