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An ALS certificate PDF: what the door reads, what it refuses

ALS · certificate of analysis (PDF, as filed)

What you are seeing — the certificate is a PDF from a regulatory filing — rotated tables, scanned pages, an appendix of a hundred pieces — and nothing reads the results out of it.

The short answer

A certificate filed with a regulator is rarely the laboratory's own file: it is a print, rotated to fit a landscape table, sometimes a scan, often one appendix among dozens. The door reads the PDF's own geometry and says what it found; it does not guess a table it cannot see.

Measured on 43 such PDFs: 0 read as laboratory results. What the door said instead, by kind: inventory 22, measurement 6, form_sheet 6, unreadable 5. The refusal codes, most frequent first: pdf.rotated_text ×22, pdf.partial_page_coverage ×6, archive.no_column_recognised ×5 — a rotated text matrix is not projected onto the page axes (its glyphs would land in the wrong columns, silently), a scanned page carries no text objects, an encrypted file is not opened.

The rest of the answer — 1 more point

The fix is on the sender's side: the laboratory holds the same certificate as an export — an xlsx or a LIMS csv — and that file reads. Ask for it; a PDF print of a table is the last thing to send.

What to do

  1. Ask the laboratory for the export that came with the certificate (Bureau Veritas: the N001 xlsx; ALS: the Excel or csv export from the portal).
  2. Drop that export — the exceedance table comes back against the register you choose.
  3. If only the PDF exists, drop it anyway: the refusal names what stopped the read, and that name is a task on our side.
A PDF print is the last thing to send

The laboratory's export reads; the filed PDF is refused with its reason.

Once it is a table, bring it here →

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