Stream and dictionary object-kind mismatches are recovered as empty content

[lin-string]

Summary

Stream objects and plain dictionaries are syntactically distinct in PDF, but object-kind mismatches in page structures are downgraded to warnings and hidden by recovery. A dictionary used as page Contents becomes empty content, while a stream used as a page dictionary becomes a synthesized empty page.

Versions tested

• playa-pdf 1.1.0 (v1.1.0, commit 85a9c1e22e327bf873e4282d66ed1dba89fa7575)
• Current main at commit 9496dfea5150343c9dc05544d9c004bbcccf17e6, checked on 2026-09-06

Test files

• Dialect-StreamIsDict.pdf, with expected behavior described in the PDF Association test documentation.
• Dialect-DictIsStream.pdf, with expected behavior described in the PDF Association test documentation.

Reproduction

import playa

for path in (
    "Dialect-StreamIsDict.pdf",
    "Dialect-DictIsStream.pdf",
):
    with playa.open(path) as document:
        page = document.pages[0]
        print(path, page.mediabox, list(page.contents), repr(page.extract_text()))

Actual behavior

For Dialect-StreamIsDict.pdf, Playa logs Found non-stream in contents and returns an empty contents sequence without raising an error.

For Dialect-DictIsStream.pdf, Playa logs Missing or invalid page object 4, substitutes an empty 612 by 792 page, and returns empty contents and text without raising an error.

Expected behavior

The missing stream/endstream delimiters in the first file and the unexpected stream wrappers in the second file are PDF syntax errors. The object-kind mismatch should remain observable to callers as a type or syntax error. If recovery is retained, it should not silently replace the malformed objects without an error channel.

Relevant implementation

ContentParser.__init__() catches TypeError from stream_value() and initializes an empty parser buffer; Page.streams catches the same error and skips the object. In the inverse case, Pages._get_pages() catches TypeError from dict_value() and creates a synthetic empty page.

Disclosure

This issue was prepared by an AI coding agent on behalf of @lin-string. The reproduction and results were verified against the current default branch.