Text Collector lets you print text messages by converting them to pdf. What we call “text messages,” of course, includes messages with both text and pictures. Sometimes they include other types of attachments, like dirty .gif files, but that’s another article. For now, I’m just discussing images and text.
On the surface, pdf seems ideal: it’s universally viewable, supports pagination, and, unlike images, includes text in a searchable way. But I don’t really like pdf as an ediscovery interchange format.
Why? Pdf is too complicated. As file formats go, it’s far from the worst monster out there, but it’s also far from simple. As a consequence, the many different programs that generate pdf often get it slightly wrong; they’re not necessarily bad programs: they’re just dealing with a complicated problem and make mistakes.
Pdf viewers grapple with the resultant problems and show you something that looks correct, so everything seems fine at first.
When you want to edit pdf, however, things quickly go wrong. For a typical ediscovery operation like stamping Bates numbers on your pdf files, the small errors compound and you have a significant chance that the result will be illegibly damaged.
Assume some set of pdf files
, and an operation
that you want to do on them to produce an output set,
.
You can visually check some number
for correctness.
When the size of
Ulfers’ Law of Batch Pdf Editing
Second, since it is complex, pdf allows all manner of invisible content. This makes redacting pdf hazardous and if you have a highly-developed sense of self-doubt, it’s hard to shake the feeling you’ve done something wrong that allows the redaction to be removed.
So, why does Text Collector convert messages to pdf and not something else?
There are no suitable alternatives. Html is universally viewable but has no notion of pagination and very limited image embedding. Microsoft Word format is too easy to edit, and comparable in complexity to pdf. Mhtml never got universal support and it lacks pagination anyway. Tiffs and text are too large and useless to average people. How about svg?
So pdf it is, for better or worse.
Should Be Simple 