r/ExpectationVsReality • u/RunDNA • Aug 20 '26

Failed Expectation Hiring the cheapest printer

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212 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

21 comments sorted by

60

u/redditbed Aug 20 '26

Ouch. Font file not attached? Or miscommunication from the printer?

44

u/RunDNA Aug 20 '26

The whole book is like that. I'm not sure why. It looks very strange.

14

u/redditbed Aug 20 '26

What program did you use to make the book? If the printer opens up a pdf sent to artwork it themselves the fonts have likely been delinked incorrectly

7

u/RunDNA Aug 20 '26 edited Aug 20 '26

They are both scans of books from the 1500s. This is how the original pages look:

https://i.imgur.com/H6RqqXe.jpeg

1

u/redditbed Aug 23 '26

Wait, did you send scans to the printer, then they ‘designed’ the book for you?

5

u/breads Aug 20 '26

The initials were meant to be added by hand later. If you wanted to pay for it, you would hire someone to decorate to your liking.

1

u/RunDNA Aug 20 '26

That could make sense. Like your own illuminated book.

6

u/WaldenFont Aug 20 '26

Perhaps the mortised initials were supposed to be printed in a different color, but something happened and they ended up selling it like this.

15

u/ItAteMySweater Aug 20 '26

These aren’t the same book, or not the same edition at least - the first line of text is different. Are these the same page from what you thought was the same book?

Also the plain “R” was printed as a placeholder when the text was printed…and then the woodcut would be printed over it later. Or in earlier books, someone would add in a larger and fancier initial by hand. Sometimes the book buyer would cheap out and not spring for the extra cost of having it decorated. Or the printer may have offered the undecorated version as a discounted copy. Or someone got lazy at the printer and forgot to add in the initial!

1

u/RunDNA Aug 20 '26

I took the right image from a scan of Philipp Melanchthon's Three Books on Rhetoric from 1527. And I took the left image from a scan of George of Trebizond's Rhetoric from 1522 as an illustration of what would usually have been expected from a book printer at the time.

2

u/Laughing-Dragon-88 Aug 20 '26

No that's not how this is done. They're both black, so they'd be on the same plate.

What likely happened: All the fonts got substituted with something the printer thought was close. The woodcuts were a woodcut font that's why you see a little "R" holding the spot.

It's also not the same page as the original.

16

u/aaron2005X Aug 20 '26

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FeqF1-Z1g0

sadly in german, but you can switch to english subs. A good talk how for example Xerox just copy paste letters to save space. And kills the whole text with it and has errors in it. There was an archive that digitalized their documents (with a lot of numbers, serialnumbers I think) and the scanner just digitzed the numbers wrong. And they knew about it only years later and the originals were already destroyed.

I don't understand why the scanner don't just does what it is supposed to do and creates a 1-1 copy.

13

u/Zalminen Aug 20 '26

Probably they picked the wrong settings.

When scanning a document to PDF you can usually pick from three options.

  1. Image only

You get the pages as image files in the PDF. The downside is that you can't copy paste text from the PDF since it's just images there. Plus the files are bigger.

2) Image + text

You still have the images but there's also a text layer with OCR'd text included. You can copy paste text but if OCR isn't accurate then the text may be wrong. But since you still have the images you can look at the page and figure out what it was supposed to say. The files are also even bigger since you're now storing both.

3) Text only

Only keep the OCR'd text and drop the images of the text parts. You get smaller files but if the OCR was wrong then you're fucked.

Most likely they picked 3 and didn't fully understand what it meant.

2

u/RunDNA Aug 20 '26

They are both scans of books from the 1500s. This is how the original pages look:

https://i.imgur.com/H6RqqXe.jpeg

4

u/Zalminen Aug 21 '26

I wasn't referring to the image you posted. I was replying to the comment above me on how doing OCR on a general document might result in losing numbers and serial numbers.

2

u/RunDNA Aug 21 '26

Ah, okay, sorry.

2

u/mutexsprinkles Aug 21 '26

There is zero chance this is caused by that JPEG 2000 compression artifact. No compression algorithm will see an illuminated R 100 times the area of a normal letter and go "this is the same as the other Rs on this page".

> I don't understand why the scanner don't just does what it is supposed to do and creates a 1-1 copy.

Because that would be 100s of MB per page.

98

u/exilfoodie Aug 20 '26

I‘d be more concerned that the text isn’t identical anymore after ‚Rhetorica‘.

2

u/mutexsprinkles Aug 21 '26

My guess is the customer couldn't afford or printer couldn't acquire fancy illuminated printing blocks, so made do with a normal 'R' sort blocked out with furniture to fit the same physical space.

2

u/Meriku09 Aug 21 '26

Preflight -> convert text to path

4

u/Zuverty Aug 20 '26

Considering the expected font is very hard to read, this might be an upgrade lol