The easiest way to accurately read obfuscated text from a canvas

The Facebook news feed is uglified with a kind of corrupted text that is hard to read for users but is easy to read automatically in a script

Facebook is one of the most successful and impressive web projects. Many people love Facebook. I also have a Facebook account, I occasionally try to use it to look for events nearby, but I am not a regular user and so I do not know all the features and benefits of Facebook.

Only recently I have noticed a strange aberration that attracted my attention. I do not remember seeing anything similar in any other website — text in some posts seems to be scratched, sometimes it is barely readable:

This original Facebook-specific oddity is the first feature that has ever interested me in Facebook. Puzzled, just for fun or personal satisfaction, I explored the Facebook news feed more closely. I found samples of the corrupted text in two places:

• The label Sponsored and names of buttons such as Learn more, Shop now, Watch more or Get Offer in ads
• The publication dates of posts

I assembled some examples of damaged text in the illustration that you can see at the top of this post. To be…