by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2011/11/10 07:01 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2011/11/10/10235681.aspx
Over in the Suggestion Box, Aakash Mehendale asked:
Today's DailyWTF has an image of a newspaper article in which the text has come out mangled with a mangling I've never seen before. It seems to have become *mostly* x and z. Any ideas on what's happened here? Bad OCR? Some really oddball re-encoding issue?
" rel="nofollow" target="_new">thedailywtf.com/.../~QCCmp2Txt~.aspx
I can't find the article in question about the mangling.
Because, as may have noticed, my Blog seems to have mangled the text.
I don't know what to do with it now.
Except maybe revel in the irony?
I didn't do it myself, but I seem to have lost some info here...
Michael Madsen on 10 Nov 2011 7:38 AM:
The proper URL is thedailywtf.com/.../~QCCmp2Txt~.aspx - in case that link breaks as well, go to thedailywtf.com/.../Error_0x27_d.aspx and click on ~QCCmp2Txt~.
John Cowan on 10 Nov 2011 8:56 AM:
It's thedailywtf.com/.../~QCCmp2Txt~.aspx (that's thedailywtf.com slash Articles slash tilde QCCmp2Txt tilde dot aspx, in case there is more corruption). The newspaper picture in question is at img.thedailywtf.com/.../Pic3.jpg .
Michael S. Kaplan on 10 Nov 2011 9:48 AM:
Weird. Doesn't look like encoding, it looks like corrupt text...
Van on 10 Nov 2011 2:20 PM:
The headline and the few pieces of text in italic are unharmed. Is it possible that a physical printing wheel of some sort was installed wrong?
Michael S. Kaplan on 10 Nov 2011 6:33 PM:
Perhaps....
Daniel on 10 Nov 2011 10:35 PM:
Maybe you can try thedailywtf.com/.../~QCCmp2Txt~.aspx
Simon Buchan on 11 Nov 2011 2:57 AM:
Printing presses print from full-page plates, so a physical muck-up seems unlikely. Looks to me like the printer uses PostScript or PDF the regular font had broken glyph mapping; either a corrupt embedded font or, less likely, fall-back incorrectly applied (assuming identical glyph-ids or something).