Guides and benchmarks

Notes on doing PDF work without handing your documents to a stranger, and real numbers from running these tools on a test corpus rather than numbers copied from a marketing page.

Guides and benchmarks

• OCR that looked like it worked - Five bugs in a browser OCR pipeline, every one of which produced a plausible success instead of an error. Measured before and after, with the code paths named.
• How small a PDF actually gets, from 50 KB to 1 MB - Five test files, both presets, and which size targets each one clears. Measured in the browser, with nothing uploaded at any point.
• What PDF compression actually does, measured - Every PDF site claims "up to 90% smaller" and none of them show their corpus. Here are the numbers for this one, the documents they came from, and how to reproduce them.
• How to check whether a PDF site actually uploads your file - Every online PDF tool claims your files are safe. Here are four checks you can run yourself in about two minutes, without trusting anybody's marketing page.