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Is there an easy way to "launder" a PDF file so that it won't appear to have been generated from LaTeX?

(I have a good reason for wanting to do this: I just tried to post an article to the arXiv, but the arXiv software isn't processing my latex source correctly, so I have to circumvent the usual way the arXiv creates a PDF from a source file. I plan to give the arXiv the source file too; I just don't want to get into a long argument with any humans about what I'm doing and why.)

I know this is more of a stackexchange sort of question, but I couldn't find it addressed there, and it strikes me as the sort of issue that mathematicians may face more often than others.

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    $\begingroup$ Maybe.tex.stackexchange.com/questions/186068/… has some ways, but it seems like arxiv keeps getting better at rejecting such submissions $\endgroup$
    – Piyush Grover
    May 22, 2020 at 20:36
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    $\begingroup$ don't, it's cheating the system, which if you choose to use arXiv is not a best practice. $\endgroup$
    – Carlo Beenakker
    May 22, 2020 at 21:11

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One solution that will always work is to physically print it and scan it back as a pdf. Alternatively, you can probably open it in Adobe or Preview (on a mac) and then use the print feature to "save as pdf." I did this latter solution once successfully to solve the exact sort of problem you are asking. I can't remember if it was for arxiv or a grant application, but I know it wasn't rendering correctly in their system, but did render correctly on mine, so I just gave them the "laundered" pdf because time was of the essence.

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    $\begingroup$ if you print and scan, find/search/select will no longer work... $\endgroup$
    – Carlo Beenakker
    May 22, 2020 at 21:58
  • $\begingroup$ You could scan with OCR, but that technology is still not great, especially for math papers. In my experience, the Tesseract OCR performs best. Indeed, simply performing OCR on a pdf generated from latex might also launder it. github.com/tesseract-ocr $\endgroup$
    – David White
    May 22, 2020 at 23:43

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