I’ve got a problem this morning, and my brain isn’t really up to it on a lazy Sunday morning, even though we’ve already been on our walk and have consumed the first cups of coffee.
Here’s the problem.
The Campaign Spending Commission agenda this past week reminded me of the ongoing lawsuit challenging Hawaii’s registration and reporting requirements for noncandidate committees that make independent campaign expenditures (Yamada et al. v. Kuramoto et al.). The case already resulted in throwing out spending limits for these committees.
So I checked the case docket in federal court, and a hearing is scheduled for February 6 before Judge Michael Seabright on cross motions for summary judgement. Both the plaintiffs and the state are asking the judge to rule their respective ways.
I downloaded copies of the documents.
The plaintiff’s motion for summary judgement runs over 90 pages but the file is only 749 KB. Not a problem.
The state’s motion for summary judgement, filed on behalf of the Campaign Spending Commission, was a little shorter but its file consumed 8.5 megabytes, about 10 times the size of the other file.
The problem is that my system is stalling out while trying to upload the larger file. And an attempt to use the software built into the Mac operating system to reduce file size resulted in fuzzy print that was difficult to read, at best.
And trying to zip the pdf file only had a very marginal impact, reducing the file from 8.5 MB to 8.1 MB.
So although you can read the conservative attack on the Hawaii law, I can’t yet provide the state’s version.
Hopefully another reader can let me know how to solve this issue! If so, I’ll post the state’s argument as well.
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It would help if the State’s attorneys would learn how to submit their dox as compressed files. But then I guess they have other, bigger problems we’d like them to deal with.
My guess is the state document was scanned from paper. Basically it’s 80+ pictures which you can look at and see the words, but you cannot search the text. The other, smaller document was created from the original word processing file, and contains the text of the document, and not a bunch of pictures. The images of the printed pages take up a lot of space, and as you discovered, you cannot reduce their size without making them mostly unreadable.
Blaine is on the right track.
It should be possible to OCR the large document and then save that text as a PDF. If you have a scanner, they often bundle OCR software in with it. Then, to save the text, use Acrobat if you have it—but Macs can also “print” directly to a PDF.
Many state government pdfs seem to be created the way Blaine describes. Not only does it result in extremely large files, but the documents are not text searchable without the end-user having to go through the laborious step of running them through an OCR program.
Given that almost all these documents begin life as a text document, this is absurd. There may also be a legal claim that such documents are needlessly to the blind, as many blind people have to rely speech-to-text software if they wish access to online information. The State Office of Information Practices should standardize the formatting for government documents. Perhaps the new IT Czar can be convinced to promote such a practice?
Scanned pdf documents can also be much larger than necessary if the default “color” setting is selected. If a document has to be scanned because the original text document is not available, the file size can be greatly reduced by taking the time to reset the default settings. Most scanners save documents in color instead of B&W these days, even if the document contains only B&W text, which means the files are much larger.
That would be a pretty lame excuse for the State to use. Most state offices use MSWord and there is a “Save As PDF or XPS” that converts the word processe document into a nice, moderately sized, searchable file. Sheesh.
Doesn’t this also cost the state more to store than had they saved as a pdf from the original source?