Citimortgage PDFs: Ugh

26 January 2008

Update, 16 February 2008: Converting PDFs into Image Files (Citimortgage PDF Reprise)

I highly doubt I'll get any satisfaction from Citimortgage on this, so I'll just complain ineffectually here.

Up till now, I've been able to view and save my monthly and other related mortgage statements with the Evince viewer in Ubuntu 7.04. Today I logged on to find that the PDFs no longer display correctly. I get a blank form with no data. I tried on my Windows XP instance in VirtualBox and Adobe complains about a missing font, but still shows the data. I tried in Ubuntu 7.10 with the same problem as 7.04.

That really bites.

The other thing that has always sucked about Citimortgage PDFs is that they're extremely bloated. Previously they've weighed in at 900KB, and now the January statement is 1.6MB. This is ridiculous, and an annoying burden on my storage overhead. Although I guess if I can't view them anymore, then I don't have to save them.

I wrote them a note but I don't expect a satisfactory resolution. Why should they care? They'll ask what operating system I'm using and if I have the latest Adobe Reader installed, and when I tell them I'm using GNU/Linux with a non-Adobe viewer, they'll say this isn't supported. Are people really happy with a world where Microsoft has a stranglehold on the desktop, and you're all but forced to use their crappy operating system and other miscellaneous proprietary software to manage your affairs?

How hard is it to support open standards and make it possible for your customers to get their data in a convenient way? (Not that the PDF format is necessarily "open," but it's open enough if people would just make boring, complying documents with it.)

Bah.

Converting PDFs into Image Files (Citimortgage PDF Reprise)

by Scott Carpenter on 26 January 2008 at 2:02 pm
permalink | comments (5) | filed under Uncategorized
tagged: obstacles

Comments

Just report them that they send blank form with no data. Don't tell anything about your pdf browser nor OS. You don't have to know how to check this. ;)
OTOH there is Adobe Reader for Linux. And Evince isn't the only open browser...

Posted by rozie on 27 January 2008 at 1:27 am

Hi, Rozie. That's what I did on my initial message, but I figure they'll ask followup questions. I suppose I could try another free viewer and see if it handles the PDF better. That's a good idea.

Posted by Scott Carpenter on 27 January 2008 at 8:04 am

Kpdf seems to be good (I never had problems with it, but yeah, I use KDE as WM). And xpdf (a quick one). I also have acrobat installed, but I never use it.

Posted by rozie on 28 January 2008 at 1:36 am

You might try my method: lie. I do this with all of the tech-related customer service people I meet these days. Yes, I have Vista service pack 2, the latest copy of Adobe bought fresh off the shelf this morning, and this is Steve Ballmer speaking and I'm armed with a chair. 99% of the time, you can apply the answer they give you to Linux, and they never knew the difference.

One time, my ISP screwed up. I get QWest, which feels about Linux the way Archie Bunker did about minorities. Anyway, their service failed in a way I was unable to fix from home, so I BS'ed tech support on the phone while they reset stuff and then told me "now go to the start menu and click the blue 'e' icon...". This kept up right until I got the web back and tested it with a visit to Google. The support guy made a surprised noise as he saw the user-ID string pop up, and I said, "Sure enough, you've been talking to MANDRIVA 10.1 with FIREFOX the whole time!" Fortunately, this guy had a sense of humor about it.

I don't mind the companies that say they don't support it - fine, I'll handle the problems on my end. What bugs me are the companies who literally say "We refuse to do business with you unless you run Windows, whether you can make it work on Linux or not."

Posted by Penguin Pete on 28 January 2008 at 9:54 am

Tried xpdf last night but no joy.

Pete, I think you're right. There's the I/T guy side of me that in the interest of fairness wants to accurately present my side of the story, but all they want to hear is the magic words that will let them say your configuration is not supported. So they're not playing fair either.

Of course, there's not a lot of happiness down that road either, since they're options for helping you with something like PDF viewing are probably limited. It's just too small of a problem to get the time of someone who could actually help you or maybe even influence how the PDFs are created.

On the other hand, maybe by making a stink about it, if they hear it from enough people, they'll actually start taking non-Windows, non-Mac systems into consideration in their design decisions. Ha! Right.

This is generally why I emphasize the need to use open standards when I write to these companies. Of course that falls on deaf or powerless ears also.

Posted by Scott Carpenter on 28 January 2008 at 4:21 pm

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