If you visit: https://12ft.io/$URL_to_pdf.pdf using a GUI browser, the raw PDF binary is dumped to the screen. There is no way to capture this. If you use wget it just gets an HTML wrapper. If you hit F12»inspect»element, you can derive a proper URL to a PDF and use wget on that. E.g.

wget 'https://12ft.io/api/proxy?q=https://mswista.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/typesofmemory_updated.pdf'

But the PDF is corrupt. There is no user-side hack here. The service is broken. Apparently the server is doing a character set conversion as if it’s ascii text.

(BTW, that sample URL above works fine without 12ft.io. It’s just an example to demo the 12ft.io problem. Of course when a PDF is walled off and I am forced to use 12ft.io, then I’m hosed)

The admin is only reachable in Twitter and Gmail, nethier of which work for me. The is a Mastodon bot at @thmsmlr@bird.makeup but that’s only good for following him. No way to report it to him AFAIK. Hence why I am posting this here.