PDFs that are readable by human eyes only
Hi, OP here. A friend was involved in a custody battle and was afraid his ex was going to leak all of his discovery documents on the internet and he asked if there was something I could do to make it harder for bots/crawlers to find sensitive information. Originally I was going to turn all of his docs to image based PDFs, but those get large fast and are easy to OCR. So I found a post musing about altering fonts/glyphs so that it looks like english, but the actual character being seen by the pdf reader is a non-english character. As such, when you try to OCR these files, it doesn't…
In plain words
PDFs that are Readable by Human Eyes Only is a tool that obscures PDF text from optical character recognition and automated crawlers by replacing standard English characters with visually identical non-English glyphs. The software is designed for individuals who need to share sensitive documents while protecting against unauthorized digital extraction and distribution. It maintains readable text for human viewers while rendering automated text recognition ineffective, offering a middle ground between image-based PDFs and standard searchable documents.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hi, OP here. A friend was involved in a custody battle and was afraid his ex was going to leak all of his discovery documents on the internet and he asked if there was something I could do to make it harder for bots/crawlers to find sensitive information. Originally I was going to turn all of his docs to image based PDFs, but those get large fast and are easy to OCR. So I found a post musing about altering fonts/glyphs so that it looks like english, but the actual character being seen by the pdf reader is a non-english character. As such, when you try to OCR these files, it doesn't see any images and can't convert it. I figured it had some potential uses and maybe you fine folks can identify other use cases. I'll be monitoring this post most of the day.
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