Last week Finance told me I have a research budget of $3,753 I need to use in the next ten days. Please help me spend it on the best possible thing: garbage!

Reporters spend all their time arguing with the government to release documents, and when they finally succeed the results are in awful, painful PDFs. For the past month I've been working on a Python PDF processing library aimed at making wrangling these documents a little easier.

But! To make sure it's actually a decent piece of software I need examples of bad real-world PDFs. So let's have a contest!

You give me bad PDFs, I give you awards.

Awards!

Awards will be given out across several categories. I won't know what worthwhile categories will be until I actually see your docs, but I'm thinking along the lines of:

  • Tables of data
  • Forms
  • Deceptively difficult OCR (text recognition)
  • Mixed types of stuff in a single document
  • Non-english-language
  • Wildcard category for strange or quasi-corrupted PDFs

I'm aiming for six categories, with four prizes each — first place gets $250, second place gets $125, and two runners-up get $75 apiece.

But really, submit anything! Official lists of endangered species in Louisiana, police incident reports, Armenian property records, we'll love it all.

Rules!

I made these rules up in five minutes, so I reserve the right to change them on a whim.

  • Submissions must come through the official form.
  • PDFs must be from the real world. Making a bad PDF is a fun creative endeavor (maybe???) but isn't what we're going for here. I want something you've been sent, found, etc etc.
  • PDFs with exploits or whatever the PDF equivalent of a zip bomb is don't fall under our definition of "bad."
  • PDFs cannot be password- or DRM-protected.
  • Entries must include a brief explanation of the issues with the PDF.
  • Entries will be judged based on how interesting, frustrating, or representative they are of real-world PDF problems.
  • You're okay with me posting the PDF publicly.
  • You can submit multiple times, but one PDF per submission.
  • Anonymous submissions are allowed but that does make it impossible for me to let you win

Entries (probably) close on Saturday, May 17, midnight NYC time.

Submit!

To make multiple submissions, just refresh the page after you submit.