obstacles category archive

Citimortgage PDFs: Ugh

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 …

Citibank: You’re on Notice

Updated, 29 September 2007: See below…

Citibank: Support free software–by supporting open standards and making your web site accessible–or become dead to me.

Free software users: please take the time to complain loudly but politely when you are prevented from using web sites that “require” Microsoft Windows plus Internet Explorer or Macintosh plus Safari or whatever combination of proprietary operating system plus web browser. Insist that they should support open standards.

I was having trouble this weekend with the login page for bill payments on citicards.com, probably because of their use of Flash. I first complained to my (long suffering) wife about this. I said now I was going to have to write and complain about it, and that it’s a challenge because I don’t want to spend that much time drafting …