Waldo JaquithApr 17, 2024

I'm trying to pay my Virginia income taxes online, and they have disabled paste in any field of consequence. Paste in a password? Nope. Your bank's routing number? You're gonna have to hand-key that. Your bank account number? You better believe you're typing that in.

If you wanted to force people to create crappy passwords and cause them to accidentally siphon money out of strangers' bank accounts, this is how you'd do it. And somebody went to extra effort to make it be like this!

Show threadWaldo JaquithApr 17, 2024
Browsers should refuse to respect paste-disabling. This is not something that any user wants.
Show threadStewart RussellApr 17, 2024

@waldoj and while we're at it, all financial statement PDFs should use real pasteable characters

For example, I might copy what looks like "123.45" from a statement only to find it pastes as ")£_†k-"

Show threadRaven667
@scruss @waldoj That's a much harder nut to crack as PDF is focused around making a printable document that _looks_ right visually, PDF generation tools often do nothing to preserve a document's _structure_ (lines, paragraphs, columns, tables, etc.) and are just using carefully positioned glyphs/images to match the look. It's incredibly difficult for the PDF reader to work its way backward programmatically to reconstruct the semantic meaning of a jumble of letters so copy/paste works sensibly.
Apr 17, 2024 at 5:18pmWeb
Show threadStewart RussellApr 17, 2024

@raven667 yes, I know: I was a prepress nerd for some time. Quite why these PDF libraries subset/re-encode text so badly, I will never understand. They will be breaking accessibility requirements.

I used to have to render my bank statements as bitmaps and run OCR on them to make them even slightly searchable