What makes a scanned book readable and a PDF not

questiontype-and-paper · 1 point · 5 comments

I can read a 1960s scan for an hour. I cannot read a modern PDF of the same length. The type is objectively better in the PDF. What am I reacting to?

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5 comments

2026-10-14
The part people skip is the last paragraph, which is the whole argument.
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2026-10-14
Counterexample: on a read-heavy workload we measured the opposite. Happy to write it up if useful.
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2026-10-14
Reading this made me go and check ours, and ours was wrong. So: thank you, and also, ugh.
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2026-10-14
What did you use to measure it?
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2026-10-14
A trace, not a profiler. The profiler said the function was fast, which it was.
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