Question on web spiders
 

Maybe not the right place but seems there are several web experts here.

Can web spiders read and harvest e-mail addresses from a pdf file ?

Many users and folks like QRZ.com are using jpegs not ascii for listing
e-mails -- this seems to work.

So for pdf files without going to a jpeg --- are ascii text addresses
harvestable ?

Thanks



--
CL -- I doubt, therefore I might be !

Caveat Lector wrote:
Maybe not the right place but seems there are several web experts here.

Can web spiders read and harvest e-mail addresses from a pdf file ?

Many users and folks like QRZ.com are using jpegs not ascii for listing
e-mails -- this seems to work.

So for pdf files without going to a jpeg --- are ascii text addresses
harvestable ?

Yes, in the sense that Optical Character Recognition (OCR) programs _can_
read text out of an image. In practice, it's not worth the spammers' or
web spider operators' trouble -- or that's been my experience, anyway.

YMMV.

--
Mike Andrews, W5EGO

Tired old sysadmin

Paul Rubin wrote:
(Mike Andrews) writes:
So for pdf files without going to a jpeg --- are ascii text addresses
harvestable ?

Yes, in the sense that Optical Character Recognition (OCR) programs _can_
read text out of an image. In practice, it's not worth the spammers' or
web spider operators' trouble -- or that's been my experience, anyway.

PDF files contain the underlying text strings and search engines index
them without OCR'ing. Whether spammers bother, I don't know.

Hi, Paul. Long time no see.

Depends on whether they're text-based PDF or image-based PDF. If I scan
a page into a JPEG or TIFF and then convert that to PDF, it may not have
any of the text as text, and I think it's improbable that it will.

--
Mike Andrews, W5EGO

Tired old sysadmin